tphd-a critical ontology of ourselves- the kantian foundations of michel foucault's philosophy

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A Critical Ontology of Ourselves: The Kantian Foundations of Michel Foucault's Philosophy

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Daniel Smith

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A Critical Ontology of Ourselves: The Kantian Foundations of Michel Foucault's Philosophy



6/16/2010

A CRITICAL ONTOLOGY OF OURSELVES: THE KANTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF MICHEL FOUCAULT’S PHILOSOPHY

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Faculty

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Purdue University

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August 2010

Purdue University

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ii

For Jen, who lovingly endured the hardships of the past seven years and committed herself to my graduate education.

God only knows what I’d be without you.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my committee members Dan Smith, Bill McBride, Pat Kain,

and Brad Stone for their patience with my numerous changes and revisions to the

chapters, and also for their advice, comments, and support. Brad is largely responsible

for generating my interest in this project (in addition to the fantastic graduate courses on

the philosophy of Immanuel Kant I took with Jeffrey Wilson, who originally turned me

on to working on Kant’s philosophy), as it was in his course on Michel Foucault at

Loyola Marymount University that first drew me to the latter’s work. He remained a

source of ideas and encouragement for both the dissertation and my graduate work on the

whole. I thank Bill for his enthusiasm to participate in this project, particularly given the

fact that the dissertation is about Foucault, who is so very hostile to the philosophy of

Jean-Paul Sartre, which is an area of Bill’s unmatched expertise. Pat also deserves thanks

for his willingness to be a part of a project that deals significantly with material outside of

his expertise in Kant’s philosophy. His comments on my work in general were always

helpful, challenging, and beneficial. Dan, my dissertation director, encouraged me to cut

my own path as soon as I began to study philosophy with him, which gave me the

courage to develop a dissertation that is largely antithetical to some near universally held

opinions in Foucault scholarship. Additionally, the last year of the project was extremely

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difficult for numerous reasons, and I am not sure it could have been completed without

his understanding and compassion.

Three graduate students in philosophy at Purdue University and close friends

aided me in completing this dissertation. Shannon Nason welcomed me to Purdue and

provided me with advice and encouragement on all things related to successfully

completing the program. Alden Stout and I came into Purdue philosophy the same year

and we defended our dissertations two days apart. He is as much responsible for my

development and work as a philosopher as any of my teachers, and his mark is present on

this dissertation. Allan Hillman deserves special mention for helping me forge my

approach to writing the dissertation and work around the landmines that I laid for myself.

His advice and understanding was invaluable in coping with the stress of writing a

dissertation, and his friendship has been a great boost.

I would also like to acknowledge that this project could have not been completed

without the aid of my family. I thank my mother and stepfather, Stephanie and Shannon

Miner, parents-in-law, Tom and Sharon Acee, and father, Michael Robinson, for what

they provided me.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page ABBREVIATIONS .......................................................................................................vii ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................... ix

INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1 Summary of the Dissertation ...................................................................................... 3 CHAPTER ONE: TOWARD A MODERATE ACCOUNT OF FOUCAULTIAN CRITIQUE .................................................................................................................... 11

1.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................... 11 1.1.1 Outline of the Chapter......................................................................... 16 1.2 Foucault’s Critique of the Subject .................................................................... 17 1.2.1 The Concept of Subjectivity................................................................ 18 1.2.2 Philosophical Anthropology................................................................ 21 1.2.3 Archaeology and the Positive Unconscious ......................................... 24 1.2.4 Power-Knowledge and the Constitution of the Subject ........................ 26 1.3 Consequences: Undermining Autonomy.......................................................... 33 1.4 The Later Foucault ........................................................................................... 38 1.5 The Philosophical Ethos of Critical Ontology ................................................... 46 1.5.1 “What is Critique?” ............................................................................ 48 1.5.2 “What is Enlightenment?” .................................................................. 54

1.5.3 Two Forms of Foucaultian Critique .................................................... 62 1.6 Conclusion: A Note on the Foucault-Habermas Debate ................................... 71

CHAPTER TWO: FOUCAULT’S KANTIAN CRITIQUE OF THE ANALYTIC OF FINITUDE AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY ........................................... 74

2.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................... 74 2.1.1 Outline of the Chapter......................................................................... 79 2.2 The Copernican Revolution and the Analytic of Finitude ................................. 80

2.3 Han and Allen on Foucault’s Alleged Criticism of Kant ................................... 90 2.4 Two Responses, Two Distinctions .................................................................... 95

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Page 2.4.1 First Response: The Distinction Between Philosophical

Anthropology and Transcendental Subjectivity ................................... 96 2.4.2 Second Response: The Distinction Between Formal and Empirical

Syntheses ............................................................................................ 99 2.5 Foucault’s Kantian Critique of the Analytic of Finitude.................................. 103 2.6 Foucault’s Kantian Skepticism about Human Nature ...................................... 114

CHAPTER THREE: HISTORICAL ONTOLOGY AS HISTORICAL ANALYTICS .............................................................................................................. 120

3.1 Introduction ................................................................................................... 120 3.1.1 Outline of the Chapter....................................................................... 125

3.2 The Current Debate about Foucault’s Methodology........................................ 126 3.2.1 Thompson’s Phenomenological Interpretation of Archaeology ......... 126 3.2.2 Koopman’s Critique ......................................................................... 135

3.2.3 Thompson’s Response ...................................................................... 141 3.3 Foucault’s Clue .............................................................................................. 147 3.4 Kant and the Form of Experience ................................................................... 154 3.5 Foucault and the Forms of Experience ............................................................ 161 3.5.1 Ontology and Thought ...................................................................... 162 3.5.2 Forms of Experience and Games of Truth ......................................... 166 3.6 Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 177

BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................... 179 VITA ........................................................................................................................... 190

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ABBREVIATIONS

All works by Michel Foucault are, where possible, cited according to both English

and French sources. I adhere to existing translations of Foucault’s works excepting in

cases where an alternative translation is both appropriate and relevant. All translations of

writings by Immanuel Kant follow the Cambridge Edition translations of his works.

Apart from Critique of Pure Reason, all texts are cited according to volume and page

number of Kants gessamelte Schriften, edited by the Deutschen Akademie der

Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902- ). References to Critique of

Pure Reason are to the standard A and B pagination of the first and second editions.

Please consult the bibliography for complete information on the texts listed below.

Works by Michel Foucault

AK/AS The Archaeology of Knowledge/L’archaéologie du savoir CS “The Culture of the Self”

DE1-4 Dits et écrits, volumes 1-4. Cited by article and page number. DP/SP Discipline and Punish/Surveiller et punir

EW1-3 Essential Works of Michel Foucault, volumes 1-3 FL Foucault Live

FS Fearless Speech H The Hermeneutics of the Subject/Herméneutique du sujet

HS1-3 The History of Sexuality/Histoire de la sexualité, volumes 1-3 IKA Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View

IMF “An Interview with Michel Foucault”

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MiC “Monstrosities in Criticism” OD The Order of Discourse/L’ordre du discours

OT/MC The Order of Things/Les Mots et les choses PPC Philosophy, Politics, Culture

PK Power/Knowledge WC “What is Critique?” in The Politics of Truth

Works by Immanuel Kant

APPV Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View C Philosophical Correspondence, 1759-1799

CPR Critique of Pure Reason CPrR Critique of Practical Reason

JL Jäsche Logic (in Lectures on Logic) LM Lectures on Metaphysics

WD “What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” (in Religion and Rational Theology)

WIE “What is Enlightenment?” (in Practical Philosophy)

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ABSTRACT

Robinson, Robert Michael Ellis. Ph.D., Purdue University, August 2010. A Critical Ontology of Ourselves: The Kantian Foundations of Michel Foucault’s Philosophy. Major Professor: Daniel W. Smith.

In his final writings Michel Foucault surprises in saying that his “critical ontology

of ourselves” extends the tradition of critical philosophy inaugurated by Immanuel Kant.

He had previously described his project as a “critique of the subject,” which purports to

demolish the Kantian conception of the human being as capable of autonomous thought

and conduct. Despite the obvious tensions between these descriptions, the scholarship

continually interprets Foucault’s later turn to Kant according to his critique of the subject.

The three essays of this dissertation challenge the efficacy of this interpretative strategy

on textual and philosophical grounds. My thesis is that Foucault’s turn to Kant is

indicative of a break in the former’s philosophical views, and therefore his earlier views

must be proportioned to his more mature, and distinctively Kantian, philosophy.

Chapter One opens with the argument that Foucault’s critique of the subject is

incompatible his later self-inscription in the critical tradition, as it cannot accommodate a

conception of autonomy. I then provide significant evidence that Foucault renounces his

critique of the subject in order to accommodate autonomy. Not coincidentally, this

renunciation occurs when Foucault begins to investigate Kant’s reflections on

enlightenment. Drawing on Foucault’s investigations of Kant and the former’s late work

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on truth-telling, I defend a moderate account of Foucaultian critique that satisfactorily

avoids the weaknesses and problems often attributed to his critical project by critics.

Chapter Two argues that Béatrice Han’s and Amy Allen’s recent interpretations

of Foucault’s alleged critique of Kant are fundamentally misguided. After elucidating the

Kantian character of Foucault’s analysis of modern philosophy in The Order of Things, I

argue that Han and Allen confuse Foucault’s critique of modern philosophical

anthropology for a critique of Kant. They fail to notice his distinction between the formal

(transcendental) subject from the subject conceived as the essential self. This leads to

their failure to notice that Foucault uses Kant’s critique of metaphysics, notably the

paralogisms of reason, to isolate the mistake of modern “anthropologism”. Finally, I

contend that these facts show that Foucault’s critique of the subject is best understood as

furthering a Kantian skepticism about possible knowledge of human nature, which fits

nicely with the account of critique defended in Chapter One.

Chapter Three focuses on the philosophy that informs Foucault’s historical

methodologies. Following Colin Koopman I argue that phenomenological interpretations

fail to capture Foucault’s mature articulations of his views. However, I challenge

Koopman’s interpretation on the grounds that it fails to account for the transcendental

language in which Foucault casts his methods. I resolve this impasse by showing that

Foucault draws significantly on the conceptual architecture of Kant’s transcendental

inquiry. Like Kant, Foucault sees a condition of experience as a rule that both enables

and constrains, but uniquely accounts for these rules as social norms. Insofar as an

analytic accounts for the rules that comprise the conditions of experience, Foucault’s

methods comprise an historical analytic of experience or “historical ontology”.

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INTRODUCTION

Much recent work on the 20th century French philosopher and historian Michel

Foucault (1926-1984) concerns his philosophical relationship to the 18th century German

philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). The impetus for this work is largely a result of

some of Foucault’s final statements, in which he describes his philosophy as a “critical

ontology of ourselves” (EW1 315/No 339, 573) and a “critical history of thought” (EW2

459/DE4 No 345, 631). Importantly, he strongly suggests that his philosophy is critical in

the Kantian sense of the term, meaning that it is concerned with ensuring the possibility

of autonomous thought and conduct. Foucault sees his historical inquiries as enabling

human beings to take ownership of themselves insofar as these inquiries make explicit

the conditions and constraints on thought and conduct. This suggested connection

between his critical project and the critical philosophy of Kant is an obvious reason to

explore potential similarities between their philosophies and relations of influence.

There is, however, an immediate problem in doing so. Any connections that

might be established are blocked by some apparently essential differences between them.

In a later essay (“What is Enlightenment?”) Foucault says that where Kantian critique

isolates within the singularity and contingency of experience the universal and necessary

forms that are constitutive of it, his own brand of critique isolates the singular and

contingent within that which seems universal and necessary. He says:

2

But if the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge must renounce exceeding, it seems to me that the critical question today must be turned back into a positive one: In what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints? (EW1 315/DE4 No 339, 574)

This passage need not be interpreted as a shot at Kant, for it merely suggests a different

philosophical orientation. However, while most commentators now widely recognize

that Foucault engaged Kant throughout the former’s career,1 and that he was always (but

not always clearly) concerned with autonomy all along, the standard position in the

scholarship is that his “radical critique of the subject” (EW3 3-4/DE2 No 139, 540) is a

“critique of [Kantian] critique”.2

It is therefore not necessarily the importance of Kant for critique that motivates

the recent interest in Foucault’s philosophical connections to Kant. Instead, it is, I think,

the perplexity of why Foucault eventually comes to call himself a philosopher in the

critical tradition of Kant when he purportedly attacks the Kantian philosophy for the

Most of the scholarship sees Foucault as setting out to

show that the self-constituting subject, or the human being conceived as providing the

foundations for knowledge and autonomy through its own activities, is a piece of

philosophical mythology and, as it turns out, leads to the subjugation, rather than

liberation, of the human being. On this reading, the Kantian project of seeking

foundations is not only not Foucault’s project, it is a unfeasible and problematic project.

According to this received view it is obvious that any potential similarities between

Kantian critique and Foucaultian critique must be understood in light of Foucault’s basic

rejection of the heart of the Kantian philosophy.

1 See especially Han’s groundbreaking Foucault’s Critical Project. 2 Allen, “Foucault and Enlightenment,” p. 189.

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better part of his career.3

The more importance that is placed on Foucault’s radical critique of the subject as

the core of his critical ontology of ourselves, the more difficult it is to make sense of how

it is capable of accommodating any significant conception of autonomy. Indeed, a

central thesis of the this dissertation is that Foucault’s radical critique of the subject and

his critical ontology are incompatible. I believe this fact has gone unnoticed because the

scholarship is too committed to making sense of Foucaultian critique in light of his

radical critique of the subject, which inevitably leads to problems with Foucault’s

understanding of critique. What must occur, I believe, is that the critique of the subject

must be proportioned to his turn to Kant and later articulations of his project as critical in

the Kantian sense. In other words, Foucault scholarship has paid insufficient attention to

the importance and consequences of his turn to Kant. The three essays of this dissertation

On the face of things, there is an incompatibility, either in

Foucault’s project itself or in the received interpretation. On the one hand, Foucault

claims to be a critical philosopher to the extent that he defends autonomy. On the other

hand, he rejects the conception of autonomy that is normative for any critical project,

namely, the notion that human beings can make explicit the constraints on their thought

and conduct and determine their thought and conduct for themselves. How, one

legitimately wonders, is the radical critique of the subject consistent with autonomy in

any sense of the concept? If the autonomous subject is the target of this radical critique,

how is it possible that autonomy is the end of Foucaultian criticism?

3 This is an explicitly motivation for Allen’s work on Foucault’s philosophical relationship to Kant. See, Allen, “Foucault and Enlightenment,” and, The Politics of Our Selves, Ch. 2.

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offer an account of Foucault’s philosophy that show the integrality of this turn to Kant,

and how it discloses both textual and philosophical problems with the received opinion.

Summary of the Dissertation

The primary thesis of Chapter One is that the 1978 lecture “What is Critique?”

marks a fundamental break in Foucault’s philosophical views, as it is his first

investigation of Kantian enlightenment and attempt to construe his historical inquiries as

being in the service of critique and autonomy. It therefore marks a conceptual shift in his

views because the program of the radical critique of the subject articulated prior to “What

is Critique?” intends precisely to undermine the concept of autonomous subjectivity.

After setting out the basic problem of the incompatibility between the critique of the

subject and autonomous subjectivity in the introductory section, I sketch Foucault’s

critique of the subject in Section 1.2. I begin by discussing its earliest articulations in the

critique of philosophical anthropology, move to a brief analysis of its formulation in the

archaeology of the positive unconscious, and then focus on his claim that the subject is

constituted within regimes of power-knowledge. The view that emerges is that not only

is there no human essence that could ground autonomy, the belief that there is such an

essential human feature is integral to the control of human thought and conduct in

modern life. I then outline in Section 1.3 how this critique of the subject conceptually

requires the exclusion of any coherent concept of autonomy.

Section 1.4 analyzes several of Foucault’s statements that I believe provide

compelling evidence that he began to reorient his philosophical project between 1977 and

1978, which is also when he begins to take seriously Kant’s reflections on enlightenment.

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I argue this evidence is decisive in establishing that Foucault now sees the Kantian

project of grounding truth-claims in the forms of subjectivity as possessing fundamental

value and that his own philosophy does not in any way undermine the attempt to discover

essential human facts. The appropriate conclusion is that Foucault has abandoned the

claim that there is no essential human feature that could ground autonomy. Although he

refuses to engage in the philosophical analysis of such a feature – what he calls an

“analytics of truth” – he allows for its possible existence, as long as such accounts of this

feature can accommodate a conception of selfhood that is also deeply dependent on

socio-historical conditions.

The purpose of Section 1.5 is to provide a plausible account of how Foucault

reorients his previous work in order to bring it into the tradition of critical philosophy. I

address two of Foucault’s most important ruminations on critique, the 1978 lecture

“What is Critique?” and the 1984 essay “What is Enlightenment?” I show that in the

former he clearly defines critique as the art of not being governed so much, which implies

a positive conception of autonomy as governing oneself more. In the latter essay

Foucault more explicitly connects critique to autonomy, and describes critique as a

philosophical attitude that is essentially geared toward promoting autonomy. While these

two essays show the general change in program, they also raise a problem. Having

shown in Section 1.4 that Foucault refuses to offer an account of autonomy but

nevertheless asserts that his critical ontology is ultimately about autonomy, Section 1.5

answers the question, How is it possible that critical ontology is about autonomy when

Foucault never accounts for it? Some commentators believe that Foucault’s concept of

“an aesthetics of existence,” or ethical self-fashioning, provides the key. For Foucault, to

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turn oneself into a work of art means that one strives to produce a conformity between

one’s discourse and conduct according to a set of rational principles. Some

commentators, and even Foucault himself at times, take this conformity to be sufficient

for autonomy. But I protest that not only is this conception of autonomy incapable of

withstanding scrutiny, because it purports to be an account of autonomy it undermines

Foucault’s refusal to engage in the analytics of truth. As such, I argue that Foucaultian

critique is about autonomy because it seeks to disclose, through genealogy, the

inconsistencies between, on the one hand, our attitudes toward and beliefs about

ourselves (i.e., attitudes, beliefs, practices, institutions, etc.) and, on the other hand, the

histories of how we came to possess those attitudes and beliefs. Foucaultian

(genealogical) critique therefore promotes autonomy because autonomous thought and

conduct is free of inconsistency, and his entire critical project is to expose said

inconsistencies. So, he assumes for his critical purposes only what any account of

autonomy requires, namely, some amount of reflective determination free of

contradiction.

Despite Foucault’s critique of the autonomous subject, the philosophical views he

expresses in his critique of philosophical anthropology are far more sympathetic to Kant

than recognized in the secondary literature. In fact, it is widely believed that Foucault’s

most well-known book, The Order of Things, is decidedly hostile to Kant’s philosophy.

Both Béatrice Han and Amy Allen have recently claimed to isolate the nature of

Foucault’s alleged objection to Kant’s philosophy. According to both, Foucault contends

that transcendental reflection is fundamentally intertwined with empirical experience,

such that the transcendental justifications for the universal and necessary forms of

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subjectivity are vitiated by their admixture with empirical experience. The purpose of

Chapter Two is to show that this objection, and the received opinion of The Order of

Things, is deeply flawed.

I begin to develop this interpretation in Section 2.2, where I disclose that

Foucault’s representation of modern philosophy as an “analytic of finitude” is

fundamentally Kantian. According to Foucault, the analytic of finitude is his chosen title

for the modern project of determining the human essence. He sees this project as

attempting to unite the empirical constraints on human thought and conduct with an

essential property of human beings, such that this property internal to the human being is

actually transcendentally constitutive of those empirical constraints. This project,

Foucault believes, is fundamentally confused, although it is not immediately clear why.

After sketching Han and Allen’s interpretation of Foucault’s alleged objection to Kant in

the first part of Section 2.4, I go on to offer two responses. First, both Han and Allen fail

to appreciate Foucault’s distinction between transcendental subjectivity and the subject

conceived within modern philosophical anthropology. This causes them to miss the

nuances of Foucault’s critical remarks about Kant. The former rebukes Kant for a

tendency to engage in philosophical anthropology; however, Foucault does not claim that

transcendental subjectivity is philosophical anthropology, and he excludes the former

from his critique of the latter. Second, there is very clear evidence that Foucault objects

to modern philosophical anthropology as confused because it distorts transcendental

philosophy, but that this criticism is not supposed to extend to the transcendental subject

as a formal condition of experience.

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Section 2.5 launches into an interpretation of Foucault’s perception of the failure

of the analytic of finitude. I provide a number of textual clues that show Foucault’s

considered position is that modern philosophical anthropology distorts transcendental

reflection. This distortion is described by Foucault as “precritical,” “dialectical,”

“illusion,” and “dogmatic,” terms that are Kantian in nature. Upon further investigation,

Foucault actually describes philosophical anthropology as a post-critical form of

paralogism, or invalid use of the transcendental subject. Foucault’s objections is that

philosophical anthropology, as the investigation of the human essence, violates the

formal conditions of possible experience, and is therefore invalid. Hence, Foucault’s

critique of philosophical anthropology is ineluctably informed by Kant’s critique of

metaphysics, which is itself grounded in his transcendental account of subjectivity.

The final section of Chapter Two (Section 2.6) briefly discusses the consequences

of these insights in relation to the views articulated in the previous chapter. My claim is

that Foucault’s philosophical understanding of the status of epistemic claims about

human beings is informed by a Kantian skepticism, which means that Foucault is

agnostic about the possibility of knowledge of the human essence. I support this

interpretation by pointing to Foucault’s later claims that he does not deny that

“anthropological universals” exist, but rather that he methodologically brackets them in

order to determine whether they are genuine universals. Thus, Foucault’s methods

supports his metaphysical skepticism about knowledge of the human essence.

Chapter Three investigates philosophical issues related to Foucault’s historical

methods. More specifically, my aim is to make sense of his claim that his “critical

ontology of ourselves,” which is Foucault’s title for his final philosophical view, takes

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the form of an “historical ontology”. I couch this investigation in deliberations about the

recent exchange between Kevin Thompson and Colin Koopman regarding Foucault’s

methods. Thompson argues that these methods are essentially phenomenological. He

defends this view by tracing Foucault’s philosophical genealogy to the work of Jean

Cavaillès, who in grappling with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Thompson

claims, sought to unify the transcendental and the historical. Thompson argues that

Foucault’s methodological work, The Archaeology of Knowledge, and particularly the

concept of the “historical a priori” developed there, is the attempt to unify the

universality and necessity of the transcendental with the singularity and contingency of

the historical. Koopman criticizes Thompson’s interpretation because it focuses too

heavily on earlier writings, is philosophically problematic, and fails to account for the

mature position that Foucault arrives at. In outlining Koopman’s criticisms I offer further

support that decisively destroys the accuracy of Thompson’s interpretation. However, it

turns out that Koopman’s interpretation of Foucault’s mature position is incapable of

accounting for the suggestive language in which Foucault frames his methods – language

that suggests it is a form of transcendental inquiry that resembles the transcendental-

historical-phenomenological approach defended by Thompson.

In Section 3.3 I begin to resolve this problem through a discussion of a brief

remark by Foucault that shows his concept of archaeology is derived from Kant, rather

than the phenomenological tradition as suggested by Thompson. Additionally, I argue

that Thompson fails to notice that in writings immediately after The Archaeology of

Knowledge Foucault resolves an outstanding problem with his archaeological method.

The problem is that Foucault had claimed that the historical a priori necessitates the

10

consciousness of individuals for a historical period, which, as pointed out in Section 3.2,

is an incoherent position. What we see is that Foucault did not sufficiently explain how

the rules of the historical a priori are efficacious, but his subsequent work strives to

sufficiently articulate this feature. I argue that Foucault sees these rules as already

existing social constraints for thought and conduct. If I am right that Foucaultian

archaeology is Kantian in origin, Foucault’s representation of these rules should bear

some relation to Kant’s philosophy.

The final two sections of Chapter Three delve more deeply into the Kantian

character of Foucault’s historical ontology. Foucault claims that his critical ontology is

an analysis of both conditions and limits, which strongly suggests that critical ontology is

modeled on transcendental inquiry. Section 3.4 provides a brief sketch of the

Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant outlines how the

transcendental conditions of experience, notably the categories, are the rule of truth and

also limits on knowledge. I proceed to show that, like Kant, Foucault conceives of the

conditions of experience as rules of truth that organize experience. For Foucault,

however, the point is not to articulate the conditions of possible experience, but the

historical conditions of the present structure of experience, notably the structure of the

experience of ourselves. He effects this change by conceiving conditions qua rules not as

concepts, but as social norms that enable and constrain. Rather than being the rule of

truth for all possible judgments, they are the rules of acceptability for actual judgments.

Thus, Foucault’s historical methodology is an historical analytic, for it seeks the elements

that constitute our experience and that also limit it. Given these analogies with Kant, the

phenomenological interpretation of Foucault’s methodology must be rejected.

11

CHAPTER ONE

TOWARD A MODERATE ACCOUNT OF FOUCAULTIAN CRITIQUE

1.1 Introduction

In his final writings Foucault describes himself as a philosopher in the critical

tradition of Kant. From Kant’s reflections on enlightenment Foucault extracts an

“attitude” or “philosophical ethos” that he believes connects him to the philosophy of the

German master and more broadly to the philosophical spirit of modernity. This ethos

takes the form of a “critical ontology of ourselves,” which Foucault describes as “a

critique of what we are saying, thinking, and doing, through a historical ontology of

ourselves” (EW1 315/DE4 No 339, 573-4). This ontology takes account of how we

consciously render ourselves into certain kinds of beings and yet in doing so

simultaneously and unknowingly impose upon ourselves contingent and arbitrary

constraints. This critical ontology therefore meets Kant’s critical philosophy in their

shared concern for arriving at forms of thinking, acting, and relating to oneself that are

freely adopted and self-directed, and as such Foucaultian critique is essentially practical

and aimed at autonomy (EW1 315/DE4 No 339, 573-4). It is directed at discerning both

“what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous

subjects” (EW1 313/DE4 No 339, 572) and also “where change is possible and desirable,

and to determine the precise form this change should take” (EW1 316/DE4 No 339, 574).

12

The goal, in other words, is to perform “the historical analysis of the limits imposed on us

and […] experiment with the possibility of going beyond them (EW1 319/DE4 No 339,

577).

“Foucault…a Kantian?” James Schmidt and Thomas E. Wartenberg incredulously

ask, “Who, one might reasonably ask, is kidding whom?”1

One powerful theme in Foucault’s work […] is the treatment of the subject as constituted by the confluence of vectors of power within which it develops. The self cannot be seen as a stable set of capacities but rather as a mere projection whose perspective, agency, and values are the result of complex dynamics of normalizing power which, through language, institutions, juridical practices, and patterns of interpersonal interactions, operate to shape the person at every turn. Power not only constrains a self, it constitutes it. And since the dynamics of power are fluid and changing, the self is fluid and changing and not able (reflectively or otherwise) to detach from those dynamics and react independently of them […].

Just two years prior to his

initial public investigation of Kant’s conception of enlightenment (the 1978 lecture

“What is Critique?”) and just eight years before Foucault officially declares himself a

philosopher in the critical tradition (the 1984 essays “What is Enlightenment?” and

“Foucault”), he says that “rather than ask ourselves how the sovereign [subject] appears

to us in his lofty isolation, we should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually,

progressively, really and materially constituted” (PK 97/DE3 No 194, 179). This is the

thesis of the project that Foucault titles a “radical critique of the subject” (EW3 3-4/DE2

No 139, 540). John Christman explains:

2

This short but accurate characterization of Foucault’s critique of the subject shows that it

is, as Christman’s last sentence suggests, in tension with the philosophical ethos Foucault

mines from Kant’s reflections on enlightenment. While there is disagreement about the 1 Schmidt and Wartenberg, “Foucault’s Enlightenment,” p. 284. 2 Christman, The Politics of Persons , p. 54.

13

nature of selfhood with respect to autonomy,3 the problem is that when Foucault begins

to speak of autonomous subjectivity he “seems to presuppose a way of speaking about the

self he had previously so effectively criticized.”4 A minimal conceptual requirement for

a subject to be morally, personally, or politically autonomous is that she possesses “the

freedom to distance herself, or to step back, from the socially given roles and practices

that contribute to her identity” 5 or that impinge upon her thoughts and actions. This

conceptual requirement strongly implies that there is some feature about human beings

that they possess essentially, a feature that enables them to establish a reflective distance

from the constituents of their identities and take ownership of themselves.6

3 See Christman, The Politics of Persons , and Meyers, “Dencentralizing Autonomy,” Velleman, “The Self as Narrator,” Oshana, “Autonomy and Self-Identity,” and Benson, “Taking Ownership”.

But in his

critique of the subject, as I will show, Foucault not only attempts to eliminate the notion

of autonomous subjectivity by denying any essential facts about human beings, he also

sees the linkage of a human essence and autonomy as being intrinsic to the his perceived

destruction of autonomy in modern practices. But Foucault’s critique of the subject

buries under the heavy weight of history, and subjugates according to stealthy strategic

social forces, the abilities to distance oneself from the determinations upon one’s identity,

thoughts, and actions and to take ownership of these features of oneself.

4 Bernstein, “Foucault,” p. 233. 5 Oshana, “Autonomy and Self-Identity,” p. 92. 6 I borrow this notion of ownership from Benson’s essay “Taking Ownership,” although I am not endorsing the view he offers there. My reason for using this language is that it seems to capture the minimal requirement of autonomy that I noted above, namely, that autonomy ultimately consists in the family of terms connoted by ownership, authorization, or endorsement. If an agent is incapable of owning, authorizing, or endorsing her conduct, then she cannot can be said to be autonomous in any intelligible sense. It is also worth noting that there are widely divergent views about what ownership consists of (see n.4 above). One assumption I am making, however, is that even in interpersonal, dialogical accounts of autonomy, such as that offered by Benson, is that it is a property of individual human beings (e.g., as reason-giving), deployed interpersonally, that is responsible for their autonomy.

14

What is peculiar is that in articulating his critical ontology Foucault retains the

same concepts and terminology of his critique of the subject. For example, he says that

critical ontology is focused on three essential questions. The first question guides his

archaeological investigations: “How are we constituted as subjects of our own

knowledge?” The second question guides his investigations in power-relations: “How

are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations?” The third

question guides his later work in ethics: “How are we constituted as moral subjects of

our own actions?” (EW1 318/DE4 No 339, 576). My added emphasis highlights the fact

that even when Foucault ventures into a critical philosophy and ethics, the question of

how the subject is constituted is still his primary concern. Now, however, he sees these

questions, which are more or less essentially the same as those of the radical critique of

the subject, as ultimately in the service of our autonomous self-constitution.7

I think it is wrong to assume that Foucault was intentionally trying to eliminate

autonomy altogether in his critique of the subject. Perhaps against his intentions,

however, the nature of his critique of the subject is such that it commits him to an account

in which there is simply no room for self-constituting human beings. Indeed, the very

modern conception of the human being as possessing a self that is capable of taking

ownership of itself in its essence is precisely the target of his critique of the subject, for in

Where he

once was seemingly obsessed with articulating an “autonomous domain” of thought (FL

54/DE1 No 55, 65-6) and the “implicit systems in which we find ourselves prisoners” (FL

73/DE1 No 89, 189), he is now trying to recover from these autonomous, implicit

domains a sense of human freedom.

7 The question of ethics does not become explicit until late in Foucault’s career.

15

it he sees a conception of ourselves that is especially appropriate for our being complicit

in a certain kind of external control. In seeking knowledge of our true ourselves in order

to instantiate our autonomy, Foucault thinks we subject ourselves to the constraints of

modern relations of power. The problem here is that it becomes mysterious exactly how

it is, as Foucault quietly announces in his final works, that we are autonomous subjects, if

it turns out that there is nothing essential about human beings that allows them to take

reflective ownership of themselves. It seems to me that while Foucault never abandons

his belief that the subject is historically and socially constituted, he does ultimately

realize that this view him with a problem to be solved. His later foray into ethics (i.e.,

self-constitution) and critical philosophy is the attempt to answer the question, Given

that human beings are historically and socially constituted, how is it that they are also

autonomous beings?

In this chapter I will articulate and defend three theses. The first thesis holds that

Foucault’s critique of the subject is in fact incompatible with the minimal requirements of

autonomy. The second thesis I offer is that there is evidence that Foucault ultimately

recognized that his critique of the subject is incompatible with the philosophical ethos of

the critical ontology he developed in his later works. I will provide evidence that

Foucault admits the possibility of an essential feature of human beings – the investigation

of which he calls an “analytics of truth” – that would account for their ability to take

ownership of ourselves and conduct themselves autonomously, but that he himself does

not engage in pursuing what these features would be. The third thesis defends a moderate

account of Foucaultian genealogical critique. The general purpose of critique is to further

human autonomy. In the first case, he offers an account of genealogy that forces us to

16

reflect on self-conceptions, practices, beliefs, institutions, etc., because it unearths

inconsistencies in them. Inconsistency alone, I will show, is sufficient to support

genealogical critique and support the end of autonomy. In the second case, however,

Foucault sometimes suggests that genealogical critique enables self-experimentation and

that this experimentation is his considered view of autonomy. I argue that this suggestion

is both lacking in justification and incompatible with his considered position about the

value of an analytics of truth.

1.1.1 Outline of the Chapter

The first task of this chapter, executed in Section 1.2, is to provide an account of

Foucault’s critique of the subject as it is articulated across his writings prior to 1978.

After providing some clarifications about Foucault’s use of the concept of subjectivity, I

sketch three aspects of his critique of the subject: his criticism of modern philosophical

anthropology, the positive unconscious mined by the archaeological method, and the

constitution of subjects according to regimes of power-knowledge. The thesis that

emerges is that a subject capable of taking ownership of itself is not only a concept

historically unique to modernity, it is intrinsic to the effectiveness of modern power-

relations in controlling subjects.

Section 1.3 accounts for incapacity of this position to account for the possibility

of autonomy. To be clear, my arguments for this problem are not intended to be decisive,

but rather indicate the tension with Foucault’s his later views. So, in Section 1.4 I present

evidence that Foucault ultimately changes his mind about the possibility of philosophical

17

inquiries into the rule of truth – or what he calls an “analytics of truth” – that would

account for what it is about human beings that enables them to act autonomously.

Section 1.5 outlines how Foucault’s later works presumes the possibility of

autonomous self-governance by focusing on his two most important works in this regard,

the 1978 lecture “What is Critique?” and the 1984 essay “What is Enlightenment?” From

an examination of these works, I will the way in which Foucaultian genealogical critique

is properly critical; that is, how it supports autonomy. After defending a moderate

account of genealogical critique, I close with some remarks about how my account is

capable of responding to the well-known criticisms of Foucault’s philosophy, particularly

Jürgen Habermas’ complaint that Foucault lacks the normative foundations to engage in

critique.

1.2 Foucault’s Critique of the Subject

The purpose of this section is to articulate the critique of the subject Foucault

expounds from his earliest works until his turn to Kant’s reflections on enlightenment in

the 1978 lecture “What is Critique?”. I begin by pointing out that in most instances

Foucault uses the concept of the subject to designate selfhood, and more precisely

essential features of selfhood. Then, I shall articulate three ways that Foucault addresses

the concept of subjectivity, each corresponding to a particular moment of his career. The

first way, which is most clearly articulated in The Order of Things, is his most direct

philosophical engagement with the concept of subjectivity. He argues, in effect, that

perceived essential facts of subjectivity are in actuality mere historical contingencies.

The second and third ways he develops this claim (which are not entirely distinct from

18

the first) are by isolating the “anonymous” or “unconscious” rules that determine the

subject. The first is most clearly articulated in The Archaeology of Knowledge, where

Foucault attempts to outline a descriptive historical method that makes the subject

dependent on historically determined rules of discourse, and the third way takes shape

when Foucault articulates his concept of ‘power-knowledge,’ which expands upon the

rules of the positive unconscious isolated in his archaeological method, importantly

adding the notion that these rules determine subjectivity by being inculcated in conduct

through practices. The latter of these is particularly important, for Foucault argues that

essentialist accounts of human nature are part of the current arrangement of power-

relations for depriving human beings of their autonomy.

1.2.1 The Concept of Subjectivity

It is important to begin with the recognition that the ‘subject’ is a term of art in

Foucault’s philosophical vocabulary. Sometimes it refers to the essential self or human

nature, sometimes transcendental subjectivity, and sometimes it seems to be specific

aspects of human nature or “anthropological universals” (i.e., criminality, sexuality,

etc.).8

8 See “Foucault” in EW2 459-63/DE4 No 335.

Perhaps the clearest definition is provided in his later essay, “The Subject and

Power,” where he says, “There are two meanings of the world ‘subject’: subject to

someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or

self-knowledge” (EW3 331/DE4 No 306, 227). The term “identity” in the second

definition is crucial, for it indicates that when Foucault uses the term subject he is most

concerned with, though not always clearly speaking about, self-conceptions or the

19

understanding of who or what one is. He continues, “Both meanings suggest a form of

power that subjugates and makes subject to” (Ibid.). Ultimately, the mature position that

Foucault adopts, and which he develops over the course of his career, is that one acquires

a self-conception through the historical and social regimes of power-knowledge that

inform the practices within which one participates. So, in undertaking a critique of the

subject, he is trying to show that our self-conceptions are socially and historically

constructed. In general, the safest understanding of the term is “human nature” or

“essential self,” and his critique of the subject is the attempt to establish that the

seemingly universal self-conceptions that we possess are in fact historically contingent

products.9

His argumentative strategy is to disassociate self-reflection, as an epistemic

instrument for discerning facts about the self, from the self as an object of knowledge.

This strategy is gestured at in the following statement:

…I am not Kantian or Cartesian, precisely because I refuse an equation on the transcendental level between subject and thinking “I.” I am convinced that there exist, if not exactly structures, then at least rules for the functioning of knowledge which have arisen in the course of history and within which can be located the various subjects. (FL 98/DE2 No 109, 373) 10

In arguing that the self is a historical construct, he is arguing that the self discerned in

self-reflection is actually antecedently given in its historically unique forms according to

practices. This is why he points out his resistance to the Cartesian and Kantian

“equation” at the “transcendental level” between the subject and the thinking self.

9 Foucault’s most revealing definition of “man” is one he follows with the descriptors “this human nature, this human essence, or this essential human feature” (FL 52/DE1 No 55, 663). 10 Foucault will also eventually come to this as the “Cartesian moment” in the history of philosophy. This moment is when the self as an object of spiritual transformation becomes subjected to scientific knowledge. See especially the first lecture for the course, 6 January 1982 (Cours Du 6 Janvier 1982), H 1-24/3-26.

20

Descartes and Kant both hold that self-directed insight discloses essential facts about

human beings, whether those facts are metaphysical (Descartes) or merely transcendental

(Kant). Foucault’s strategy is to drive a wedge between the self taken as object and the

self conceived as constitutive of the properties of this object by arguing that the self as

object is historically given. So, he does not deny that there is a subject of self-reflection;

rather, he denies that there is a true self that appears to itself in self-reflection. Rather

than discovering an already existing subject with essential features, then, Foucault thinks

that the subject is constituted at “the transcendental level” by historical (and ultimately

social) rules.”

He approaches the elimination of the essential self or essential features of the self

(i.e., the subject) in three ways. First, in The Order of Things he claims that

philosophical accounts of the human essence, or philosophical anthropology, require a

confused mixture of empirical and philosophical propositions; more specifically, it

requires that empirical facts are wrongly given transcendentally constitutive powers.

Second, in articulating his archaeological method, Foucault claims to be capable of

isolating the positive unconscious of knowledge, which is an anonymous field

constitutive of knowledge.11

11 In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault distinguishes between conscious knowledge, which he calls “connaissance,” and the unconscious of knowledge, which he calls “savoir”. Foucault says, “By connaissance I mean the relation of the subject to the object and the formal rules that govern it. Savoir refers to the conditions that are necessary in a particular period for this or that type of object to be given to connaissance and for this or that enunciation to be formulated” (AK 15 n. 2).

The consequence this has for subjectivity is that known

features of the self are in actuality a result of the historically variable rules upon which

reflection is dependent. Foucault further adds the notion of power to his conception of

knowledge, which elaborates the rules on which knowledge is dependent as socially

21

imposed constraints. But he also goes further, claiming that the proposition that the very

modern understanding of the essential self is intrinsic to contemporary and implicit forms

of constraint on human conduct. He retains his view that the subject is historically

constituted, but what he adds (or at least further articulates) is the proposition that the

very notion that we possess an essential self is intrinsic to modern forms of control over

human thinking and conduct.12

1.2.2 Philosophical Anthropology

Foucault is clear in The Order of Things that Kant’s transcendental idealism is

significant for the structure of modernity. Its importance lies in the division between a

transcendentally constitutive subject and the empirical constituted subject. On the one

hand, the self is, from the transcendental perspective, merely a formal condition of

experience that is altogether bereft of essential properties indicative of a human nature.

On the other hand, the self is given to itself as an object of empirical knowledge. We can

examine ourselves according to natural laws and make generalizations, Kant thinks, but

we can never know if the self is anything more than a merely natural entity that behaves

according to natural laws. Foucault thinks that the master move of modernity is to derive

from the empirical analysis of the constraints on the empirical self (given the assumption

of transcendental constitution) the essential properties of the human being that are

constitutive of (or make possible) those very constraints. According to Foucault, that

human finitude, or the fact that human beings are determined by the natural world and

12 This theme is undoubtedly present in History of Madness, as modern humanist treatment of the insane is merely a new means of reason’s relationship to madness by controlling it, and rearticulated when Foucault turns to power-relations in the wake of The Archaeology of Knowledge.

22

external forces, itself comes to stand as a condition of the possibility of knowledge of

human beings. Foucault claims that modern thinking is therefore dominated by a

conception of the human being as “a strange empirico-transcendental doublet, since he is

a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge

possible” (OT 318/MC 329). Foucault is critical of this conception of the human being,

calling it “anthropologism” and comparing it (albeit unclearly) to psychologism (OT

348/MC 359). His considered criticism is that it confuses the empirical and

transcendental; it is an empty “half-empirical, half-philosophical” “universal reflection on

man” (OT xxiii/MC 15).

While Foucault is clear that Kant’s philosophy is decisive for the structure of

modern philosophy, it is not clear whether it is the target of his criticisms of its

anthropologism. There is, however, evidence that he does.13

Anthropology as an analytic of man has certainly played a constituent role in modern thought, since to a large extent we are still not free from it. […] This had already been formulated by Kant in his Logic,

He says, “Anthropology

constitutes perhaps the fundamental arrangement that has governed and controlled the

past of philosophical thought from Kant until our own day” (OT 342/MC 353). He goes

on to say:

14

13 Some recent literature, which has had a favorable reception, attempts to clarify Foucault’s understanding of Kant’s role in modern anthropologism. Both Béatrice Han (see Foucault’s Critical Project, “Foucault and Heidegger on Kant and Finitude,” and “The Analytic of Finitude and the History of Subjectivity”) and Amy Allen (see “Foucault and Enlightenment” and The Politics of Ourselves , especially Ch. 2) contend that, for Foucault, Kant is mistaken to think that there are forms of experience that hold universally and necessarily. They both offer variations on the reading that Foucault contends that transcendental constitution and empirical determination are inseparable and ultimately confused; in short, transcendental philosophy, which purportedly mediates empirical experience, is itself helplessly mediated by empirical experience. Chapter argues that they are mistaken, as Foucault sees the subject as a merely formal requirement of experience.

when to his traditional trilogy of

14 Kant says, “The field of philosophy in this cosmopolitan sense can be brought down to the following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope? 4. What is man? Metaphysics answers the first question, morals the second, religion the third, and anthropology the fourth.

23

questions he added an ultimate one: the critical questions (What can I know? What must I do? What am I permitted to hope?) then found themselves referred to a fourth, and inscribed, as it were, ‘to its account’: Was is der Mensch? (OT 340/MC 351-2)

In related texts, Foucault says that “the Kantian critique carried the possibility – or the

peril – of an anthropology” (EW2 257/DE1 No 30, 446), and that despite the positive

contribution to philosophy of the critique of reason, Kant limited the extent of its

contributions “when he ultimately relegated all critical investigations to an

anthropological question” (EW2 76/DE1 No 13, 239). This “anthropological question” is

the same as that to which the other three critical questions are referred (namely, “What is

Man?”). So, when Foucault describes his project in The Order of Things as “the attempt

to question afresh the limits of thought, and to renew contact in this way with the project

for a general critique of reason,” it is at least plausible that, given the above remarks

about Kant, Foucault sees an essentialism about human nature contained in Kant’s

transcendental project (OT 342/MC 353).

Whether Foucault attacks the Kantian conception of the subject is important

because the latter provides the starting point of all philosophies of the subject. So, if he

implicates Kant in his critique of anthropologism, then it would appear that he attacks the

subject at its philosophical roots. Most commentators interpret The Order of Things in

precisely this way, seeing it as providing decisive evidence of Foucault’s complete

rejection of the subject. There is evidence that Foucault holds this view.15

Fundamentally, however, we could reckon all of this as anthropology, because the first three questions relate to the last one” (JL 9:23-5.).

“Nothing,”

Foucault says in 1968 in response to questions about his work, “is more foreign to me

15 In Chapter Two, Section 2.4.1 I show that Foucault strongly suggests that the Kantian conception of transcendental subjectivity is not to be included within his critique of anthropologism.

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than the question of a constraining sovereign and unique form” (FL 35/DE1 No 58, 677).

In response to a question about his announcement in The Order of Things that ‘man,’ or

essentialist views of the human being, are dead or no longer philosophically feasible,16

The death of man is nothing to get particularly excited about. It’s one of the visible forms of a more general disease, if you like. I don’t mean by it the death of god but the death of the subject, of the Subject in capital letters, of the subject as origin and foundation of Knowledge, of Freedom, of Language and History.

Foucault asserts the “death of the subject”:

One can say all of Western civilization has been subjugated, and philosophers have only certified the fact by referring all thought and all truth to consciousness, to the Self, to the Subject. In the rumbling that shakes us today, perhaps we have to recognize the birth of a world where the subject is not one but split, not sovereign but dependent, not an absolute origin but a function ceaselessly modified. (FL 67/DE1 No 68, 788-9)

Clearly, in describing the subject as dependent Foucault believes that it is historically

constituted. According to the scholarship, The Order of Things is one of Foucault’s most

distinctive efforts in trying to establish this thesis.

1.2.3 Archaeology and the Positive Unconscious

Foucault explains that his “essential task” in The Archaeology of Knowledge, his

follow-up to The Order of Things and methodological treatise, is “to free the history of

thought from its subjection to transcendence,” which means producing a history in

“which no transcendental constitution would impose the form of the subject.” “My aim,”

Foucault says in the conclusion, “was to cleanse [history] of all transcendental

narcissism” (AK 203/AS 264-5). Generally, Foucault aims to dissociate knowledge of

objects from any constitutive acts of the subject. This aim is achieved by uncovering the

‘historical unconscious’ of knowledge for particular period of time, which is “a level that

16 See OT 386-7/MC 398.

25

eludes the consciousness of the scientist and yet is part of scientific discourse” (OT

xi/DE2 No 72, 9) and which “enables thought to operate on the entities of our world” (OT

xvii/MC 9) by being an “intermediary between words and things” (FL 61/DE1 No 66,

776). The intermediary here “are the rules put into operation through a discursive

practice at a given moment that explain why a certain thing is seen (or omitted); why it is

envisaged under such an aspect and analyzed at such a level; why such a word is

employed with such a meaning and in such a sentence” (FL 61/DE1 No 66, 776). By

describing these rules as “unconscious” Foucault means that they operate within

discourse and yet at a preconceptual level (AK 62-3/AS 82-3). They are technically

defined by Foucault as “a body of anonymous, historical rules, always determined in the

time and space that have defined a given period, and for a given social, economic,

geographical, or linguistic area, the conditions of the enunciative function” (AK 117/AS

153). The level of the enunciation is the level of the statement,17 which acquires its sense

not through the intentional locutions of individual subjects, but through the anonymous,

historically determined and preconceptual rules that determine what kinds of statements

are acceptable.18

17 A statement is any manner of material communication. It includes not only propositions and assertions, but also graphs, charts, labels, etc.

Foucault says, “If a proposition, a sentence, a group of signs can be

called a ‘statement,’ it is not therefore because, one day, someone happened to speak

them or put them into some concrete form of writing; it is because the position of the

subject can be assigned” (AK 95/AS 126). Because the meanings of the sentences or

18 Foucault does not develop the notion of “acceptability” until after The Archaeology of Knowledge. I argue in Chapter Three, Section 3.5, that the best interpretation of discursive rules is that they are social constraints on the kinds of truth-claims that a society condones. See also the subsequent subsection, where I briefly elaborate this view.

26

propositions are dependent on and only possible given the antecedent anonymous rules of

discursive practices, knowledge becomes dependent upon these rules and practices.

Consequently, what is known about some particular object is less a matter of coming into

knowledge of the object itself and more about the rules that allow one to know an object.

As Foucault says, objects are not antecedent to discourse (AK 47/AS 65).

For Foucault, as his archaeological inquiry in The Order of Things says, the

modern conception of the human being as possessing a self-constituting essence is a

modern invention that emerges only through changes in the configuration of the positive

unconscious of knowledge. By methodologically accounting for a level of thought

without subjectivity, however, he claims to show that there is no sense in which the

essential self can be understood as underwriting history. History is not, in other words,

the progression toward the realization of the self-constituting subject. Instead, this

alleged essential self is a product of historical changes that happens behind the back of

the reflecting subject.

1.2.4 Power-Knowledge and the Constitution of the Subject19

When Foucault begins to analyze relations of power in the 1970’s, the project of

accounting for the historical constitution of the human being remains essentially the

same. For example, he says:

19 My reading of Foucault’s work on power-relations in the 1970’s is guided by his work on governmentality developed in the later 1970’s. A consequence of this hermeneutic is that I tend to favor an understanding of the relation between truth and knowledge in which Foucault is trying to show how what is accepted as true has tangible consequences for how human beings conduct themselves. This position is developed in more detail in Chapter Three, Section 3.5. Along with Robert Nola, I find unclear and confused Foucault’s work on the relation between power and knowledge prior to 1978. It is not until he introduces his notion of conduct, I think, that he begins to adequately clarify their relation. For a good paper on some of the problems and ambiguities in Foucault’s representation of the relation between power and knowledge, see Nola’s “Knowledge, Power, Discourse, and Genealogy in Foucault”.

27

One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that’s to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework. […] [A] form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history. (PK 117/DE2 No 192, 147)

It would be a mistake, however, to see this as a mere methodological injunction, in which

Foucault is trying to articulate an historical method that does not make recourse to the

subject at all. In his 1972 lecture “Truth and Juridical Forms,” he will come to

characterize his work as a “radical critique of the human subject by history” (EW3 3/DE2

No 139, 540). He says:

Two or three centuries ago, Western philosophy postulated, explicitly or implicitly, the subject as the foundation, as the central core of all knowledge, as that in which and on the basis of which freedom revealed itself and truth could blossom […] It would be interesting to try and see how a subject came to be constituted that is not definitively given, that is not the thing on the basis of which truth happens to history – rather, a subject that constitutes itself within history and is constantly established and reestablished by history. It is toward that radical critique of the subject by history that we should direct our efforts. […] In my view, what we should do is show the historical construction of a subject through discourse understood as consisting of a set of strategies which are part of social practices. (EW3 3-4/DE2 No 139, 540)

“In other words,” Foucault says elsewhere, “rather than ask ourselves how the sovereign

[subject] appears to us in his lofty isolation, we should try to discover how it is that

subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted” (PK 97/DE3 No

194, 179). So, he intensifies his critique of the subject by introducing the concept of

power to account for its historical constitution. He does so by recasting the rules of

discursive practices in terms of social constraints. What he failed to account for in his

28

archaeological period is why agents follow the rules of discursive practices.20

The first indication of a deeper understanding of how discursive rules produce

subjects is in his 1971 lecture, The Order of Discourse.

By

introducing the notion of social constraints, Foucault is able to provide a more sufficient

account of how the rules of practices ‘come from below’ to constitute subjects (HS1

94/124). This requires, however, that he broaden the scope of rules beyond discourse to

include all practices as such. Now, the rules are social constraints for both discourse and

conduct. Subjects are historically constituted as objects of knowledge through discursive

rules, but they also exhibit qualities to be known insofar as their actions are regulated

through practices.

21

20 This is a claim I defend in Chapter Three, Sections 3.2.3 and 3.3.

There, he differentiates

between the truth of a statement and a statements being ‘within the true’ (OD 224/36-7).

A statement is capable of being true, or within the true, when it meets the constraints

imposed upon statements by those within the communities of discourse. Foucault says,

“I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled,

selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures” (OD

216/10-11). This mechanism of control is the introduction of Foucault’s concept of

power into his account of discourse. “Power,” Foucault says, “not only creates true

discourses, but what is much more important, it creates the constraints that allow us to

separate true discourse from false discourse” (FL 159; my emphasis). It is capable of

creating these constraints because power institutionalizes a set of rules for determining

appropriate conduct within practices, whether that conduct is discursive or non-discursive

21 The English translation of L’ordre du discours is inexplicably titled “The Discourse on Language”. I have opted for the more appropriate translation, “The Order of Discourse”.

29

in nature. Consequently, what power-relations create and sustain is a “system of

acceptability” for conduct (WC 61), such that only certain forms discursive and non-

discursive conduct is acceptable (DL 224/OD 36-7). The logical consequence of this

view is that for a statement to be recognized as true22

truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its régime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (PK 131/DE3 No 192, 158)

or for some action to be acceptable

it must satisfy antecedently given criteria. He emphasizes this point when he says that:

He continues, “‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which

produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A

‘régime’ of truth” (PK 133/DE3 No 192, 160). As the term ‘régime’ implies, there is a

certain government or “politics” of truth. This policy of truth, which is also applicable to

actions, is put into form by the ends of practices. The ends of discursive practices and

non-discursive practices, Foucault thinks, share a common goal, which is to render

conformity, stability, and regularity in human conduct.

In this regard, Foucault is particularly concerned with how the constraints of

discursive practices are translated into constraints upon individual conduct. He thinks

there is a deep relation between the things we claim to know about ourselves and the

distinct ways in which we organize human society. There is, as he will suggest, a relation 22 I offer some insight into Foucault’s view of truth in Chapter Three, Section 3.5.2.

30

of force between truth and knowledge, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, how

human beings conduct themselves. While Foucault often appears to offer a theory of

truth when he talks of or implies regimes of truth,* he is better understood as suggesting

that the organization of truth has consequences for human conduct.23

23 I discuss this topic in more detail in Chapter Three, Section 3.5.2. I argue that the best interpretation of Foucault’s statements about truth is not a theory about truth, but rather an account of how the constraints on truth have distinct consequences for conduct.

. The power of truth

to be invested in human conduct is not exerted, however, by any individual agent or

group of agents, but it is rather invested in conduct through the rules that direct it

according to the ends of practices. So, the ends of practices enter into an “intentional but

nonsubjective” communication, in which the ultimate end of practice is the regularity of

conduct (HS 95/124). For this reason, Foucault continues with the theme of the

anonymity of the rules that direct us, describing relations of power as “intentional but

nonsubjective” (HS 95/124). As certain constraints are unconsciously enforced for the

options of what can be a true statement, there is an organization that occurs for how

human beings will allow themselves to live. So, Foucault says, “It seems to me that

power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations

immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own

organization” (HS 92/121-2). Power is self-organizing because it is not oriented toward

any particular end apart from importing knowledge directly into the thoughts and actions

of individual subjects in order to produce regularity and conformity in conduct. So, what

is acceptable in the domain of truth bears a distinctive relation to appropriate forms of

conduct. The constraints on truth do not bear on conduct merely through constraining

conduct, but also by constraining conduct through first enabling it. By the very notion of

31

constraints means that some forms of discursive and non-discursive conduct are going to

be eliminated as unacceptable; however, within the domain of what is accepted there is

space for the creation and development of forms of conduct, albeit within the existing

constraints.

Foucault believes that knowledge of the self in particular generously allows for

more effective means of regulating individual conduct. Generally, power masks itself

through knowledge (or truth), for if something is taken to be true there is a willingness to

comply with how knowledge is to be implemented. With regards to human beings, if

something is taken to be true about us, then Foucault thinks we are more willing to accept

that truth as guiding for our conduct. One of Foucault’s chief theses is that our modern

demand for and preoccupation with acquiring knowledge of ourselves becomes precisely

the way in which our conduct becomes more effectively regulated. Foucault takes Plato’s

claim that the soul is the prison of the body and inverts it, claiming that knowledge of the

soul (or the self) is the prison of the body or our embodied conduct. In Discipline and

Punish he says:

The man [l’homme] described for us, who we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body. (DP 30/SP 34)24

Foucault is clear that he does not take knowledge of self, or access to it, to be distorted by

ideological mechanisms; rather, the very notion of a self is a regulative ideal for

knowledge to bring about real effects in conduct. It is through knowledge of ourselves

24 One should understand Foucault’s use of the term “man” according to the sense given to it in The Order of Things, which is the being capable of discerning, through empirical science, its own essential properties.

32

that our conduct can be more effectively managed. But the lynchpin for Foucault is that

it is the pervasive belief that there is an essential self that must be discovered or liberated.

Without this belief our conduct cannot be surreptitiously regulated, for it is through our

acceptance that there is an essential self that purported knowledge of who we are is

capable of being invested in our conduct. For example, if we accept psychology as a

science, then psychological knowledge about what constitutes normal human conduct

becomes regulative of our conduct. For this reason, Foucault understands that our

demand for self-knowledge is actually a form of self-subjugation, and not in the positive

sense, for this kind of self-subjugation is a form of mastery of which agents are not fully

aware and therefore cannot authorize. For this reason, Foucault says that subjects as sites

or vehicles of power but not in possession of power; they are subjected to power without

wielding it (PK 98/DE3 No 194 180). In order to be masters of ourselves, Foucault

suggests, we must let go of the notion that there is anything essential about ourselves.

We must relinquish our dependence on the pseudo-scientific, half-philosophical, half-

empirical knowledge of ourselves and their incorporation in our daily activities, Foucault

thinks, for it is precisely those false forms of knowledge that regulate our conduct and

ultimately undermine our freedom.25

25 Although I disagree with his final assessment of Foucault’s position on the Kantian philosophy, McGushin presents a more detailed case as to why Foucault thinks that a conception of the essential self functions in concert with power to ensure our subjugation. See McGushin, Foucault’s Askēsis, pp. 255-75. There are a couple of points about this claim worth mentioning. First, I understand Foucault’s mature position to focus on the investment of knowledge of human beings in their conduct, regardless of whether that knowledge is genuine or not. His immature position seems to assert that all investment of knowledge in human conduct is mistaken because there is no knowledge of human beings to be attained. The former position, as we will see in Section 1.4 below, does not require the tenuous claim of the latter position. Second, construing Foucault’s focus on the cover relations of power involved in knowledge of the essential self as a concern with freedom is mostly implied. There seems to be little sense in Foucault pointing it out if. in the end, the overall goal is not desubjugation, which is precisely what he says in “What is Critique?” (see Section 1.5.1 below).

33

1.3 Consequences: Undermining Autonomy

My purpose in this section is to present merely a prima facie case for the

incompatibility of Foucault’s critique of the subject with the concept of autonomy. A

prima facie case is sufficient for present purposes, for not only are these criticisms well-

known and often discussed in the secondary literature,26

To begin, let me point the reader back to a passage already cited in order to

reiterate that Foucault targets any conception of autonomy that would see autonomous

action requiring some knowledge of the self. We have seen Foucault say in 1972, “Two

or three centuries ago, Western philosophy postulated, explicitly or implicitly, the subject

as the foundation, as the central core of all knowledge, as that in which and on the basis

of which freedom revealed itself and truth could blossom” (EW3 3-4/DE2 No 139, 540).

In response to this notion, Foucault offers his project of a “radical critique of the subject”

according to which not only is the essential self an untenable ideal, it makes possible

modern forms of control of human conduct. It would appear that, at least on the face of

things, he is undertaking not only a critique of the subject, but a critique of a subject

conceived “as that in which and on the basis of which freedom revealed itself”; that is, a

I will argue in the next section

that beginning in 1978 Foucault began to grapple with accounting for human freedom in

the wake of his critique of the subject. I argue that Foucault ultimately relinquishes the

strong view that it is intrinsically impossible to account for the essential features of

human beings that allow them to be self-governing. So, below I simply point out the

basic problems.

26 See in particular the literature in the footnotes of Section 1.6.

34

critique of how a subject renders itself autonomous. What else could Foucault mean by

such a critique when he says that his demonstration of “the death of the subject,”

understood “as origin and foundation of Knowledge, of Freedom, of Language and

History,” shows that the subject is “not sovereign but dependent” (FL 67/DE1 No 68,

788-9)? In showing the historical constitution of the self, Foucault appears intent on

undermining a concept of the subjectivity in which, through some internal features, the

subject makes itself free.

This critique of the subject has perplexed some of Foucault’s critics. They notice

an “ethical impulse” toward human freedom in Foucault’s writings but see his view of the

historical constitution of the self according to regimes of power-knowledge as conflicting

with this impulse.27 For example, Charles Taylor says, “The Foucaultian notion of power

not only requires for its sense the correlative notions of truth and liberation, but even the

standard link between them, which makes truth the condition of liberation.”.”28 A

particular kind of truth-claim that Foucault is intent to undermine are those claims that

would purport to possess the truth about the self, and especially a truth about the self that

is responsible for autonomy.29

27 Leiter, “The Epistemic Status of the Human Sciences,” p. 1.

So, one way of construing Taylor’s claim is that the very

“grammar” of Foucault’s critique of the subject implies that there is an essential feature

of the self that is distorted or covered over. That is, Foucault’s critique of the subject

requires for its very coherence a commitment to the claim that human beings possess

some essential feature of the self that is undermined by power-relations in a way that

28 Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” p. 93. 29 Taylor is more concerned with what he perceives as Foucault’s rejection of any context-independent truth-claim, which he sees as relativism. I think Foucault, unfortunately rather unclearly, distinguishes between truth and constraints on truth. See Chapter Three, Section 3.5.2.

35

prohibits the subject from taking ownership of itself. Problematically, however, Foucault

himself denies that there is any essential feature of the self that would generate

autonomy. So, he is both committed to asserting that there is some feature of the self that

is dominated in power-relations and yet according to his critique of the subject he denies

that there is any such feature. Consequently, he holds an incoherent position.

This is, of course, an unfortunate consequence, but it seems that the real problem

in Foucault’s critique of the subject is his historicism. An irreducible and essential

feature of autonomous subjectivity is that the subject is capable of guiding one’s own

conduct according to reasons, standards, or values that one is ultimately responsible for.

As Christman puts it, “In general, autonomy is meant to manifest self-government, the

ability of the person to guide her life from her own perspective rather than be

manipulated by others or be forced into a particular path by surreptitious or irresistible

forces.”30

This ideal of autonomy is perhaps best captured in the philosophy of Kant, which

Foucault will eventually turn to. Kant rejects that we can possess metaphysical

knowledge of the self but argues that morality is dependent on nothing but practical

reason, and autonomy is instantiated in only those acts where one submits to the authority

of reason. Thus, the reason of the subject itself gives the law, and when it respects this

self-given law, it is autonomous; literally, a law unto itself. Kant’s account of autonomy

does not depend on any special insight into who we are, though who we are might be

relevant to our ability to more effectively render ourselves autonomous; his account is, as

it were, metaphysically light, whereas the concept of a self-constituting free subject that

30 Christman, The Politics of Persons , p. 134.

36

Foucault attacks is appears to be one in which the acquisition of knowledge of the human

essence is a requirement for freedom. Of course, Kant’s account is unique insofar as it

depends on the view that only perspective needed is one that affirms practical rationality.

Others interested in accounts of autonomy, such as Christman, point out and defend the

claim that current theories of autonomy need to account for the influence of social and

historical circumstances in shaping the “perspective” of ourselves that we are supposed to

own.31 Current approaches might abandon the Kantian account of autonomy for its

perceived lack of sensitivity to history and social phenomena, but the idea of autonomy

as self-governance requires that the ultimate ‘seat’ of ones thoughts, actions, values, etc.,

is oneself. If there is an ineluctable historical and social dimension of the self, it cannot

go all the way down because then the very notion of self that is responsible for directing

its thoughts, actions, values, etc., is lost. Moving toward an historical account of the self

need not require the Kantian conception that the self is the source of those reasons,

standards, or values that one must appropriate to be autonomous.32

31 See Christman, The Politics of Persons , Ch. 7.

For example, J.

David Velleman accepts the claim that there is no true self or human identity to be

discovered. Nevertheless, he believes autonomy is possible. Not only do we identify

certain features of our actions that resemble a narrative, Velleman argues, we choose

actions in such a way as to fit a narrative of our selves. What it is to be an autonomous

self, then, is to self-consciously attempt a unification of self via overarching narrative.

Even on Velleman’s account subjects are capable of reflectively informed narration that

enables them to take authority over their lives. What any account of autonomy requires –

32 For this view, see Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity.

37

and must explain – is the notion that a subject is capable in some capacity of taking

ownership of itself. This means that the subject, when she acts autonomously, authorizes

her own living, by whatever measure such authorization is to be measured.

Nancy Fraser has helpfully suggested that rather than attacking a particular

conception of the autonomous subject as both false and pernicious, Foucault extends his

attack to the concept of autonomous subjectivity as such. Clearly, in his archaeological

writings Foucault offers an account for the thorough historical constitution of the self.

But rather than attempt to carve out or account for some sense of autonomous subjectivity

that is compatible with the historical and social constitution of the subject, Foucault

attacks the concept and even contends that it is intrinsic to the modern form of the control

of human conduct. Obviously, however, Foucault does grant that we are autonomous and

free. He says, “Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are

‘free.’ By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of

possibilities in which several kinds of conduct, several ways of reacting and modes of

behavior are available” (EW3 342/DE4 No 306, 237). As this quotation from his later

writings suggests, he does not abandon the concept of power. Indeed, we shall see that

Foucault reorients his project in order to account for autonomous subjectivity. In order to

do so, however, Foucault must relinquish his commitment to the claims that the concept

of autonomous subjectivity is merely a new fangled form of control, and that there might

in fact be an essential feature of human beings that generates autonomy. I think it is the

case that Foucault does relinquish said commitment and allows for the possibility of an

essential human feature generative of autonomy.

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1.4 The Later Foucault

I have titled this section “The Later Foucault” because I think there is evidence of

a fundamental break in his conception of the subject that occurs roughly around 1978, the

same year he begins to explore the nature of critical philosophy and its relevance to his

own views. The claim I develop and defend in this section is that Foucault allows for the

possibility of an essential human feature (or features) that is necessary for the exercise of

autonomous subjectivity, but he also avoids committing himself any account of what that

feature might be. By granting that such an account might exist, he is entitled to recognize

that the ethical impulse of his work is the promotion of autonomy. In the next section I

will explain how his avoidance of accounting for the feature that generates autonomy is

consistent with his self-description as a critical philosopher.

Foucault’s final interview opens with a question about the perceived change in his

style between his earlier writings and his two most recent (and final) books at that

moment, the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, L’Usage des plaisirs

(The Use of Pleasure) and Le Souci de soi (The Care of the Self). He explains that he has

been recently reading his manuscripts for the unpublished (and never published) work on

Christian morality, Les aveux de la chair (Confessions of the Flesh). He explains that the

latter is actually the first manuscript written for the series, which officially began with the

publication of La volonté de savoir in 1976, and he notices in those manuscripts “the

same refusal of style evident in The Order of Things, History of Madness or Raymond

Roussel”, which he says he “completely gave up” “[v]ery abruptly, in 1975-76” (FL

465/DE4 No 354, 696-7). His reason is that he “had it in mind to do a history of the

subject,” and he could not treat the subject as “an event that would be produced one day”

39

and therefore it would be inappropriate to “recount the genesis” of the subject (Ibid.). He

continues to discuss this abrupt change:

In admitting – and I admit it! – that with The Order of Things, History of Madness, even with Discipline and Punish, I put into practice a philosophical study essentially founded on a certain use of vocabulary, of play, of philosophical experience to which I adhered to completely, you can be sure that now I’m trying to disengage myself from that form of philosophy. (FL 465/DE4 No 354, 697; translation modified)

What, exactly, is he admitting here? “What hampered me in the preceding books,”

Foucault says, is that he focused too intently on problems of truth and power “without

taking into account individual conduct [la conduite individuelle]” (FL 466/DE4 No 354,

697). Taking “individual conduct” into account gave him “a guiding thread which didn’t

need to be justified by resorting to rhetorical methods” (Ibid.). Another way of putting

this same point: “Perhaps I’ve insisted too much on the technology of domination and

power” (EW1 225/DE4 No 363, 785). So, he is clearly not abandoning his previous

work, but he is nevertheless admitting that he ignored “individual conduct” entirely. The

fact that Foucault uses the term “conduct” is very important, for as we will see below, the

question of autonomy precisely concerns the possibility of conduct as a form of being led

or leading oneself. By saying he ignored individual conduct, he is saying he ignored the

ways in which individuals lead themselves. This would appear to be an admission that he

had ignored how agents are self-governing or autonomous.

But even in making such admissions, it is obvious that Foucault is being

disingenuous. He did not simply focus too much on truth and power at the expense of

individual conduct, he undertook a “radical critique of the subject” in which he tried to

show that individual thought and action adhered to historically variable but nonetheless

40

determinate rules. Foucault’s work on regimes of power-knowledge is precisely to show

that the very conception of a subject as self-directing is a bit of philosophical knowledge

that masks modern forms of surreptitious coercion. Now, however, his project of a

history of the subject analyzes how subjects constitute themselves within the domain of

action and in relation to truth and power. Indeed, Foucault declares that ethics, or how

one reflectively relates to oneself in terms of their conduct, is “the considered form that

freedom takes,” for it implies a sense of self-mastery through reflection (EW1 284/DE4

No 356, 712). The interviewer in which he makes this latter statement about freedom,

clearly stunned by the implications of freely self-constituting subjects, asks hasn’t he

“always ‘forbidden’ people to talk to you about the subject in general?” Foucault

suggests that he has not “adequately” explained himself, and explains that what he

“refused [refusé]” is “the idea of starting out with a theory of the subject” (EW1 290/DE4

No 356, 718; translation modified). There is no doubt that Foucault is again being mildly

disingenuous here, for while refusing to acknowledge the subject for methodological

reasons is the position he might have taken,33

But even if Foucault is being disingenuous about his prior commitments, it

remains the case that he seems to be moving toward accounting for human freedom. The

ethical impulse that marks his earlier works seems to be moving to forefront. There is

Foucault is not merely bracketing the

subject in his earlier works but undertaking – to return to a characteristic description of

his earlier – a “radical critique of the subject,” to show that the self-constituting subject is

both philosophical mythology and practically coercive. A change of rhetoric in this case

implies, as Foucault himself seems to suggest, a different philosophical position.

33 In Chapter Two, Section 2.6. I will argue that this is the position the mature Foucault does in fact adopt.

41

more evidence that in his later works Foucault is trying to incorporate a thicker sense of

subjectivity in his philosophy. Consider the following statement, which is on the par of

an admission, in his Preface to the second volume of The History of Sexuality:

Posing the question [of a history of thought] in this way brings into play certain altogether general principles. Singular forms of experience may perfectly well harbor universal structures; they may well not be independent of the concrete determinations of social existence. However, neither those determinations nor those structures can allow for experiences (that is, for understandings of a certain type, for rules of a certain form, for certain modes of consciousness of oneself and of others) except through thought. […] That [thought] should have this historicity does not mean it is deprived of all universal form, but, rather, that the putting into play of these universal forms is itself historical. (EW1 201/DE4 No 340, 580)

The references to “universal structures” and “universal form”34 should be startling given

the above representation of Foucault’s earlier works. Unfortunately, it is

characteristically vague, but in 1982 Foucault breaks with the flow of a presentation to

provide what amounts to clarification of the above passage, asserting that “we are

thinking beings,” which according to him means that “we do […] things not only on the

ground of universal rules of conduct [règles de conduite universelles] but also on the

specific ground of a historical rationality. It is this rationality, and the life and death

game that takes place in it, that I’d like to investigate from a historical point of view”

(EW3 405/DE4 No 364, 816; translation modified).35

34 In Chapter Three, Section 3.5.2, I argue that the use of “form” here is not accidental, as it can be shown to be a manifestation of Foucault’s Kantianism.

There are, on the one hand,

universal rules for guiding conduct, and, on the other hand, historically specific forms of

35 In his late work “The Subject and Power,” for example, he says, “Perhaps the equivocal nature of the term ‘conduct’[conduite] is one of the best aids for coming to terms with the specificity of power relations. To ‘conduct’ [conduit] is at the same time to ‘lead’ [mener] others […] and a way of behaving within a more or less open field of possibilities” (EW3 341/DE4 No 306, 237). Foucault goes on to define the “exercise of power” as a “‘conduct of conducts’ and a management of possibilities” (Ibid.). The importance of Foucault saying that there are universal rules of conduct certainly implies that subjects conduct themselves according to rules that hold with universality.

42

conduct-guiding rationality. Notice how this distinction mirrors the similar distinction in

the previously cited passage, where Foucault distinguishes between universal forms of

experience and historically singular forms of experience, and then says that the former

are always put into play within the latter. It is plausible then that when Foucault refers to

universal forms of experience, he is speaking about universal rules of conduct, especially

given that for Foucault a form is a rule.36

There is yet more and compelling evidence that this is the case. In several

comments of his later writings Foucault unequivocally asserts that the project of

searching for universal standards of reason, which is certainly conducive to a Kantian

conception of autonomy, is not only an essential feature of modern thought, but it is a

valuable feature of it. Consider the opening of Foucault’s 1982 lectures on the

technologies of self:

The notion of universal rules or forms of action

and rules or forms of experience suggests precisely what Foucault had previously

attacked. To admit the possibility of universal rules or forms of conduct implies that

there are certain rules that hold universally for all subjects. While this certainly does not

equate to an admission of autonomous subjectivity, it is conducive to such an account. It

is Kant, we are reminded, who argues that only that conduct that conforms to universal

rules is autonomous conduct. Consequently, at the very least Foucault is allowing for the

possibility of a Kantian form of autonomous subjectivity.

The general framework of what I call the “technologies of the self” is a question that appeared at the end of the eighteenth century. It was to become one of the poles of modern philosophy. This question is very different from what we call the traditional philosophical questions: What is the world? What is man? What is truth? What is knowledge? How can we know something? And so on. The

36 I show their synonymy in Chapter Three, Section 3.5.2.

43

question that arises at the end of the eighteenth century, I think, is: What are we in our actuality? You will find the formulation of this question in a text written by Kant. I don’t pretend that the previous questions about truth, knowledge, and so on have to be put aside; on the contrary, they constitute a very strong and consistent field of analysis, what I would like to call the formal ontology of truth . (EW3 403/DE4 No 364, 813-4; my emphasis)

The importance of the emphasized portion of this passage is perhaps not immediately

obvious. It is more easily elicited by comparing it to similar comments, where instead of

titling the alternative to his project a “formal ontology of truth,” Foucault uses the

description “analytics of truth”. In is first lecture of the 1983 course at the Collège de

France, Foucault says:

Kant seems to me to have founded the two great critical traditions between which modern philosophy is divided. Let us say that in his great critical work Kant laid the foundations for that tradition of philosophy that poses the question of the conditions in which true knowledge is possible and, on that basis, it may be said that a whole stretch of modern philosophy from the nineteenth century has been presented, developed as the analytics of truth.

But there is also in modern and contemporary philosophy another type of question, another kind of critical interrogation: it is the one we see emerging precisely in the question of the Aufklärung or in the text on the Revolution. That other critical tradition poses the question: What is our present? What is the present field of possible experiences? This is not an analytics of truth; it will concern what might be called an ontology of the present, an ontology of ourselves, and it seems to me that the philosophical choice confronting us today is this: one may opt for a critical philosophy that will present itself as an analytic philosophy of truth in general, or one may opt for a critical thought that will take the form of an ontology of ourselves, an ontology of the present […]. (PPC 95/DE4 No 351, 687)

Notice that in these passages Foucault describes both the “formal ontology of truth” and

“analytics of truth” as being one side of the divide of modern philosophy and concerned

with answering traditional philosophical questions. Importantly, Foucault explains that

he does not see these traditional philosophical inquiries as lacking in value and he relates

44

them both back directly to Kant. It is safe to say for Foucault a formal ontology of truth

and an analytic of truth are one and the same.

The importance of Foucault’s claim that an analytics of truth (or formal ontology

of truth) does not lack value and constitutes a strong and consistent field of analysis is

that he is claiming his philosophical views do not make contact with whatever property it

is that makes a claim true. Hence, he denies being engaged in a formal ontology of this

Kantian sort. It is relevant, too, that Foucault does not limit the scope of an analytics of

truth; that is, Foucault sees a formal ontology or analytics of truth as being a certain kind

of inquiry not constrained by its object. In the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of

Pure Reason Kant famously argues for the universal validity of the categories, “without

which no object can be thought at all,” and which is described as “a logic of truth” (CPR

A62/B87). In the first book of Critique of Practical Reason Kant undertakes an “analytic

of pure practical reason,” where he articulates a “rule of truth” for practical judgments

(CPrR 5:16). An analytic in general seeks to discern the grounds of particular kinds of

judgments and in doing so establish the criteria for their evaluation. This admission

blows the door open for reading Foucault as not denying the validity of philosophical

projects that would articulate what it is about human beings that defines and establishes

their autonomy. Since Kant argues for his account of autonomy precisely according to

his analytic of truth for practical reason, Foucault is committing himself to the viability of

that project.

It is absolutely crucial, then, that Foucault does not draw an exclusive disjunction

between his project and the formalist project in the Kantian vein. He is not asserting an

‘either/or’ between these projects, which means he is not denying genuine philosophical

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facts about human beings that would support a theory of autonomy. In fact, to assert

otherwise is, I contend, to fall victim to Foucault’s idea of the “blackmail” of the

enlightenment. In articulating his critical ontology, which is not geared toward asking

foundational questions about question the validity of reason (qua rationalities), Foucault

says:

Yet 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). (EW1 313/DE4 No 339, 571-2)

If we understand Foucault to include Kant in the tradition of Enlightenment rationalism,

which we surely ought to, and that he includes himself as a critic of the Enlightenment,

then this passage is a straightforward denial that the “rationalist,” formal project of the

analytics of truth is essentially opposed to the history of the present. Foucault does not,

in the end, deny that the project of ascertaining universally valid conditions of

knowledge, morality, etc., is an empty project. Consequently, he does not deny that there

is some essential human feature activated in autonomous conduct, whatever it might be.37

While it is obvious that Foucault himself is not interested in contributing to this

analytical project, it was precisely this project that his critique of the subject sought to

undermine. So, for Foucault to now say that this project has permanent value is for him

to implicitly admit that his critique of the subject is decidedly not his current project, and

that his current project is to be understood as not conflicting with the possibility of

37 It might be the case that Foucault’s historicism about the self excludes some accounts of autonomy. I am, however, treating a Kantian account as the extreme version of a rationalist view of autonomy.

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analytically grounding features of subjectivity required for autonomy. My suggestion,

then, is that when Foucault admits to a philosophical change of style, he is also denying

key features of his critique of the subject. To be clear, this is not to say that Foucault is

denying that the subject is to some extent historically constituted according to regimes of

power-knowledge, for he never abandons or forsakes his earlier work entirely. However,

if Foucault is to be understood as consistent – that is, as not saying that an analytics of

truth is both possible and valuable and also committed to denying its possibility and value

– then it must be the case that he does not think the subject is historically and socially

constituted ‘all the way down’. There is some ahistorical fact about them that enables

them to be autonomous agents. In the first case, this means admitting that the analysis of

relations of power is geared toward the promotion of autonomy and, as a logical

consequence, seeking autonomy is not necessarily contributing to one’s own domination.

In the second case, he allows for – and should given the prior consequence – an account

of autonomy consistent with the historical constitution of the self.

1.5 The Philosophical Ethos of Critical Ontology

Having defended the claim that there is a break in Foucault’s thinking about the

nature of subjectivity, I now want to explore the way in which Foucault conceives of his

project as contributing to autonomy. I focus on Foucault’s May 1978 presentation to, and

discussion with, the French Society of Philosophy, “What is Critique?”, and his 1984

essay, “What is Enlightenment?” From an examination of these texts I will show, firstly,

that autonomy is a central concern of his and, like Kant (according to Foucault),

autonomy is bound to governmentality. Second, I will articulate two ways in which

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Foucault’s philosophy might be understood as critical philosophy or supporting

autonomy. In the first case, it is a form of historical critique. On the one hand, historical

critique might be represented as merely trying to distance us from our self-conceptions,

practices, beliefs, attitudes, and institutions by disclosing their histories. Historical

critique can promote autonomy by enabling us to recognize the sources of our self-

conceptions, etc. On the other hand, historical critique might take the form of

genealogical critique, which attempts to establish an inconsistency between how some

self-conception, etc., is self-represented in the present and its actual history. Because

consistency is at the heart of autonomy, Foucault thinks, one fails to think or conduct

oneself autonomously if one misrepresents the history of their thought and conduct. In

the second case, Foucault often suggests that his critical ontology promotes the self-

transformation of and experimentation with who we are because it discloses the arbitrary

constraints on our thought and conduct. I argue that this latter form of critique is

problematic on two fronts. If it is the end of Foucault’s critical project, it suggests,

firstly, a view of autonomy that lacks substance and, secondly, a contradiction of

Foucault’s refusal to engage in the analytical project of grounding autonomy.

Since these essays, particularly “What is Enlightenment?”, have been spoken

about at great length in the secondary literature, I will not preoccupy myself with

explicating them in full, but rather concern myself with Foucault’s conception of critique

and its relation to autonomy.

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1.5.1 “What is Critique?”

The first instance in which autonomy becomes a visible object of concern for

Foucault is in the 1978 lecture “What is Critique?” He opens with a short history of

critique and its complete manifestation in Kant’s reflections on enlightenment. Foucault

says that in the 15th century there was a multiplication of the arts and techniques of

governing. Governing, as Foucault defines it, is “the way in which the conduct of

individuals or of groups might be directed,” or a way of “conducting” the actions of

others by leading them (EW2 341/DE4 No 306, 237). At the same time that governing

becomes a major social and political issue, the “perpetual question” is raised of “‘how not

to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an

objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by

them” (WC 44). Critique, Foucault says, is therefore a ‘counter-art’ to governing insofar

as it is “the art of not being governed quite so much” (WC 45) or “the art of voluntary

insubordination, that of reflected intractability” that has the end of “desubjugation of the

subject” (WC 47; my emphases). Critique is, as it were, a means of resisting

authoritative forms of governing and determining for oneself how one is going to conduct

oneself. This characterization of critique, Foucault says, is “not very different from the

one Kant provided in the essay, “What is Enlightenment?” (Ibid.).

But what is critique in the essay, “What is Enlightenment?”, and how is it related

to governmentality? Kant sees critique and enlightenment as mutually implicative

concepts. To engage in critique is to undertake the task of enlightenment. The age of

criticism and the age of enlightenment are one and the same. While critique is more

commonly associated with Kant’s foundational projects in his critical trilogy, it is more

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generally the use of one’s reason, on one’s reason, and according to reason’s principles.

Only those claims that can satisfy reason’s demands are ultimately of “pure reason,” or

necessary for all rational beings. Thus, a critique will always yield up to knowledge only

those claims that are requirements of reason itself. All other claims must therefore be

judged according to those requirements. He makes all of this clear in the essay, “What

Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking”. He says:

[F]reedom in thinking signifies the subjection of reason to no laws except those which it gives itself; and its opposite is the maxim of a lawless use of reason […] The natural consequence is that if reason will not subject itself to the laws it gives itself, it has to bow under the yoke of laws given by another; for without any law, nothing – not even nonsense – can play its game for long. Thus the unavoidable consequence of declared lawless in thinking (of a liberation from the limitations of reason) is that the freedom to think will ultimately be forfeited […]. (WD 8:145)

What, then, is the proper use of reason and lawfulness in thinking? “To make use of

one’s own reason,” Kant says, “means no more than to ask oneself, whenever one is

supposed to assume something, whether one could find it feasible to make the ground or

the rule on which one assumes it into a universal principle for the use of reason” (WDM

8:146n; cf. WE 8:39). This rule, Kant says, is “the supreme touchstone of truth in oneself

(i.e. in one’s own reason),” and is “the maxim of always thinking for oneself” (WDM

8:146n). Lawfulness in thinking is simply to adopt only those maxims for thinking that

could hold with universal validity. So, practical and political critique will ask, Is the

claim I am making on myself and others, and the claims that others are making on me,

capable of holding with universal validity?

All of this is essential background to Kant’s definition of enlightenment. He says:

Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self -incurred minority. Minority is inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction

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from another. This immaturity is self-incurred when its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! Have courage to make use of your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment. (WE 8:35)

This definition of enlightenment, as Foucault recognizes, requires being persistent in

one’s courage to think for oneself and defy, in the public use of reason only, any

presumed external authority. The grounds on which to defy an external authority is

found in what it means to think for oneself, namely, to consider whether the rule on

which the external authority is based is capable of being universally adopted. To proceed

in enlightening oneself is to submit to the formal constraints of rationality; in other

words, enlightenment is only achieved when humanity recognizes reason as the sole

legitimate authority in how to think and act. This requires testing maxims of thought and

action for their universal validity. Thus, external authority in itself is not to be defied in

the “private use of reason,” which concerns one’s “civil post or office with which he is

entrusted” (WE 8:37), and external direction is capable of being legitimately authoritative

if and only if it operates according to reason. A minority condition is therefore self-

incurred when one follows the direction of another without use of their own reason, for

they fail, whether out of complacency or fear or some other shortcoming, to test the

authority of the direction given by another.

When reading Kant, one might be tempted to read him in purely procedural terms.

On this reading, the process of enlightenment is simply the procedure of applying the

maxim of enlightenment to various maxims or claims, and if those maxims or claims fail

to be universalizable, then one is ‘enlightened’ in that particular respect, and the constant

task of enlightenment is simply applying the formula to new claims. This is correct, but

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Kant, like Foucault, sees the constraints on our ability to think for ourselves as

clandestine. Consider the following passage from Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”:

[I]t is difficult for any single individual to extricate himself from the immaturity that has become almost nature to him. He has even grown fond of it and is really unable for the time being to make use of his own understanding, because he was never allowed to make the attempt. Precepts and formulas, those mechanical instruments of a rational use, or rather misuse, of his natural endowments, are the ball and chain of an everlasting immaturity. (WE 8:36)

A plausible interpretation of this passage is that Kant is speaking about the mediation of

reason by heteronymous influences. In other words, the human use of reason, Kant

worries, is weighed down by a lack of clarity about what is rational, so much so that the

ability of humanity to extricate itself from immaturity is the tallest of orders, for one

lacks any means of distinguishing a heteronymous use of reason from an autonomous use

of reason. This is why using one’s reason publicly, “as a scholar before the entire public

of the world of readers” (WE 8:37) is so important, for it is only through reasoning with

others that humanity maximizes its ability to discern the proper character of the use of

reason, especially by those who claim to possess some kind of authority over human

conduct.

The critical attitude that Kant brings to fruition, then, is the attitude of resisting

presumed authorities on the conditions of the correct use of reason, and testing those

presumed authorities based on the rightfulness of the principles on which they act. This

“critical attitude” – “which Kant made possible”38

38 Foucault’s use of “possible” is ambiguous. He might mean historically possible, in the sense that Kant is the first person to speak of autonomy in this way. However, he ignores Kant’s arguments for speaking of autonomy in this way.

(WC 50) – “appears as a specific

attitude in the Western world starting with what was historically […] the great process of

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society’s governmentalization” (WC 48). According to him, Kant is the first to notice

and resist governmentalization in his demands that ecclesiastical and state powers justify

themselves to the public, and Kant provides the means for the act of challenging the

legitimacy of state governing by grounding all forms of government in the universality of

reason. Thus, Foucault says that “Kant set forth critique’s primordial responsibility, to

know knowledge,” which the latter then uses to dictate the terms of appropriate

governmentality, namely, only those forms that are fit to the demands of universal

reason.39

But Foucault worries that modern forms of govermentality possess the power to

twist Kant’s demands. If acts of governing can appear to possess the authority of reason,

then there is greater justification for those governed to subject themselves to the

interventions of the governors. There is, then, the potential for reason to become a tool of

power-relations and allow for more precise and infiltrating forms of governmentality

based on presumed truth or rational justification. He specifically notes the historical

combination of scientific rationality and the development within the state of effective

means of governing its citizens (WC 50). If fact does or appears to possess the validity of

a science, then it might be wielded to justify certain acts of governing. So, through the

development and refinement of science, the state acquires, though not through

unquestionable maneuvers, more precise techniques for intervening in the conduct of the

governed. The more rational the state appears the more effective the state will be in

conducting the lives of its citizens. In presumed rational justification itself, then, there is

39 I am assuming here that by “knowledge” Foucault means both theoretical and practical knowledge.

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the hidden and pernicious possibility that individuals will lose their ability to be self-

governing. “Thus,” Foucault says:

the fact that the 1784 question, What is Aufklärung?, or rather the way in which Kant, in terms of this question and the answer he gave it, tried to situate his critical enterprise, this questioning about the relationships between Aufklärung and Critique is going to legitimately arouse suspicion or […] more skeptical questioning: for what excesses of power, for what governmentalization, all the more impossible to evade as it is reasonably justified, is reason not itself historically responsible? (WC 51)

It is in light of the dangers of the rationalization of different kinds of inquiry – that is,

their claimed legitimacy in being applied to individuals for the purposes of governing –

that Foucault says:

What we are trying to find out is what are the links, what are the connections that can be identified between mechanisms of coercion and elements of knowledge, what is the interplay of relay and support developed between them, such that a given element of knowledge takes on the effects of power in a given system where it is allocated to a true, probable, uncertain or false element, such that a procedure of coercion acquires the very form of justifications of a rational, calculated, technically efficient element, etc. (WC 59)

Foucault sees his project as critical in the spirit of Kant insofar as it is an analysis of

knowledge, but it is not knowing knowledge, which is “critique’s primordial

responsibility,” in the sense of understanding the universal conditions of the correct use

of reason that are then applied to questioning legitimate governance. Rather, it is to

examine the constant entwinement of reason and power-relations in governing in order to

understand exactly how it is that we are governed. So, several years later Foucault will

say that the very nature of:

critical thought since the eighteenth century has always been, still is, and will, I hope, remain the question: What is this Reason that we use? What are its historical effects? What are its limits, and what are its dangers? How can we exist as rational beings, fortunately committed to practicing a rationality that is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers? (EW3 358/DE4 No 310, 279)

54

Thus, Foucault’s project is critical in the sense that it is aimed at “not being governed so

much” or, conversely, governing oneself more, by highlighting where knowledge and

reason enable relations-power.

1.5.2 “What is Enlightenment?”

Foucault does not so much as articulate a conception of autonomy in “What is

Enlightenment?” as he does continue to explain just how the work he has been

undertaking for the better part of his career contributes to autonomy. In this essay he

seeks “to emphasize the extent to which a type of philosophical interrogation […] is

rooted in the Enlightenment” but without “faithfulness to any doctrinal elements” (EW1

312/DE4 No 339, 571). This type of philosophical interrogation is “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” (Ibid.). The end of the

task, Foucault says, is to determine “what is not or is no longer indispensable for the

constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects” (EW1 313/DE4 No 339, 572).

Alternatively, Foucault explains that this philosophical ethos is that “in which the critique

of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits imposed on

us and experiment with the possibility of going beyond them” (EW1 319/DE4 No 339,

577). It consists in a “task that requires work on our limits” as that which gives “form to

our impatience for liberty” (Ibid.). In other words, this philosophical ethos consists “in a

critique of what we are saying, thinking, and doing, through a historical ontology of

ourselves” (EW1 315/DE4 No 339, 573-4) – of how we have constituted ourselves – so

that we can “separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the

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possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think” (EW1 315-6/

DE4 No 339, 574). For this reason, it is essentially a form of practical critique.

However, this is not a form of critique grounded in any particular set of

principles, apart from the ideal of autonomous subjectivity as self-governance. It

concerns a reflection on limits, Foucault says, but these limits are not to be construed in a

Kantian manner, but rather as those arbitrary and contingent constraints upon the exercise

of our freedom. He says:

But if the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge must renounce exceeding, it seems to me that the critical question today must be turned back into a positive one: In what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints? (EW1 315/DE4 No 339, 574)

This means it will not pursue “the search for formal structures with universal value,”

which as we know from the previous section means this is not a gesture of rejection, “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, and saying” (EW1

315/DE4 No 339, 574). This kind of historical criticism, Foucault says elsewhere,

“consists in seeing on what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established,

unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based” (EW3 456/DE4 No 296,

17). The goal of criticism therefore consists in “showing that things are not as obvious as

people believe, making it so that what is taken for granted is no longer taken for granted.

To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy” (Ibid.). The manner

in which to proceed, Foucault says, is to analyze what we think, do, and say, or more

concisely to study the rules of the practices that we engage in as exemplifying our limits

(EW1 315/DE4 No 339, 577). For this reason, he titles his project a “critical ontology of

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ourselves,” for it concerns how we have been constituted, the ways we constitute

ourselves, and the effects between them.

The stakes of engaging in this critical ontology are similar to those noted in

“What is Critique?” Foucault says, “What is at stake, then, is this: how can the growth

of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?” (EW1

317/DE4 No 339, 576). Put in alternative language, the question is how can one’s

capacities for self-government be disassociated from the intensification of governing

others. While practices are the objects of study, the critical ontologist is trying to discern

the “forms40

Perhaps the most important aspect of this essay for the current discussion about

how Foucault’s work contributes to autonomy is found in his statements that his work is

inhabited by a critical “ethos”. Since his critical ontology is not grounded in any

principle other than the maximization of autonomy, it is not a doctrine as much as it is a

philosophical attitude or “a certain manner of philosophizing” that “could be described as

of rationality that organize [our] ways of doing things […] 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” (EW1 317/DE4 No 339, 576). What must be

studied, then, is the systems of action and how they acquire their autonomy in contrast to

the ways in which we autonomously govern ourselves and how our own self-government

either increases or decreases the capacities of others to be self-governing. Thus, Foucault

comes to see critique, like Kant, as an essentially dialogical or public matter; governing

oneself is, at the same time, related to the government of others.

40 In Chapter Three I argue that these “forms” are rules, and therefore must be understood as the constraints for thinking and acting that humanity imposes upon itself.

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a permanent critique of our historical era” (EW1 312/ DE4 No 339, 571) that is the

critical “analysis of the limits imposed on us” in the present (EW1 319/DE4 No 339,

557). This ethos is a “voluntary choice made by certain people” to appropriate the

present, to belong to it, by seeking to grasp it as it is and change it. “For the attitude of

modernity,” which Foucault takes to be characteristic of his work, “the high value of the

present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to […] imagine it otherwise than it is,

and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is” (EW1 311/DE4 No

339, 570). For Foucault, this means grasping who we are, not as possessing an essence to

be liberated, but as an object to be appropriated and invented, not unlike “a work of art”

(EW1 312/DE4 No 339, 571).

At this point I am going to take leave of Foucault’s essay to discuss this ethos in

more detail as it is related to this notion of autonomy as a work of art. Ultimately, this is

the direction in which Foucault’s later work moves. He must navigate between being a

proponent of autonomy and yet not articulate, as a matter of consistency since he refuses

to engage in an analytics of truth, any precise feature of ourselves that makes us

autonomous. What he proposes, then, is that autonomy consists in the relation that one

has with oneself. This relation, Foucault says, is one of self-creation and self-invention,

and the criteria should be achieving beauty. This certainly suggests that what it means to

be self-governing is merely a matter of taste, which is an implication that smacks of

relativism. I think this is ultimately correct, as I will argue in the subsequent subsection.

However, I want to briefly point out that while Foucault ultimately and controversially is

quiet about how one is to fashion oneself as a work of art, his conception of an

“aesthetics of existence” is not at all lacking in rigor; that is to say, the consummate artist

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exhibits a perfect symmetry between their discourse and their deeds. So, when Foucault

advocates that his project possesses an ethos, we ought to see him, in a manner not unlike

Kant, advocating a principle of harmony between what one thinks and how one acts. I

think this is the core of how Foucault sees his project as enlightening, and it is easily

missed. Let me explain.

In The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault appears to lament the loss of the

ancient conception of epimeleia heautou or care of the self. For the ancients, he argues,

they conceived as the care of the self as intrinsically related to the gnōthi seauton or the

Socratic injunction to ‘know yourself. The ancients conceived knowledge of the self not,

Foucault claims, as knowledge of essential properties of the self to be discovered through

philosophical and scientific inquiry, but in conjunction with caring for oneself conceived

as a work of the self on itself. This work, which Foucault equates to a kind of

“spirituality,” involves various techniques and practices for fashioning oneself into a

certain kind of being, work that proceeds in relation to a distinct conception of what it is

about oneself that must be worked on in order to render oneself into the kind of being one

thinks one ought to be. There is a sense of truth to be attained here, a truth of

correspondence not between propositions but between what one is given and the end of

producing oneself according to what one has been given. However, there is a “Cartesian

moment,” Foucault says, in which the injunction to ‘know yourself’ loses any connection

with caring for the self (H10-14/12-16). Now, one no longer knows oneself as a certain

kind of being to be shaped and transformed, but rather in a merely metaphysical and

scientific sense. The philosophical sense of a knowing oneself in the sense of caring

oneself, of producing oneself as an object of truth, was essentially lost until Kant. “If we

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now consider things downstream, if we cross over the other side, starting with Kant, then

here again we that the structures of spirituality have not disappeared […] from

philosophical reflection” (H28/29).

It is precisely the ethos that Foucault discerns in Kant’s text on enlightenment that

the former believes to inhabit his own work. But in what sense? Foucault says:

After Descartes, we have a subject of knowledge which poses for Kant the problem of knowing the relationship between the subject of ethics and that of knowledge. There was much debate in the Enlightenment as to whether these two subjects were completely different or not. Kant’s solution was to find a universal subject that, to the extent it was universal, could be the subject of knowledge, but which demanded, nonetheless, an ethical attitude – precisely the relationship to the self which Kant proposes in Critique of Practical Reason. (EW1 279/ DE4 No 326, 411)

Put differently, Kant, as Foucault himself says in his lectures on the hermeneutics of the

subject, put the “supplementary twist” on the Cartesian moment by making the subject in

itself unknowable (H190/183). However, Foucault says, “Kant introduces one more way

in our tradition whereby the self is not merely given but is constituted in relation to itself

as subject” (EW1 280/DE4 No 326, 411). He does this, as Foucault says above, by

making the subject capable of working on itself through its reason. Through a critique of

practical reason, in other words, the subject knows itself as self-legislating the

requirements of the moral law, and the moral law requires that every maxim an agent

adopts must be fit for being a universal law. In this requirement of fitness in the maxims

and the self-legislated law is, as Onora O’Neill says, “an indispensable strategy for

disciplining thinking or action in ways that are not contingent on specific and variable

circumstances.”41

41 O’Neill, Constructions of Reasons, p. 59.

What Kant articulates in his ethics, and which he carries over into his

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injunction to his peers to possess the courage to use their reason, is a rational principle

(the supremely rational principle, by his lights) for a perfect consistency between what

the rational will requires of itself and how thoughts and actions ought to be. Thus,

Kantian morality and enlightenment is, on Foucault’s account, representative of the

ancient ethos even if it departs significantly from much of its other content, for Kant’s

ethics advocates a means by which one works on oneself and brings conformity in

oneself through rational principles.42

This background is important for understanding what Foucault means when he

says that we should create ourselves as works of art. The art of life, Foucault believes, is

a rational art and one for bringing conformity in one’s discourse and actions. The

correlation emerges particularly clearly his in 1982 lectures on parrhesia or truth-telling

at Berkeley, titled Fearless Speech. It is clear in those lectures that the “art of life” or

what Foucault sometimes calls an aesthetics of existence is to be understood in the Greek

sense, as a techne tou biou, as techniques for how to life. Socrates is a pivotal example.

He challenges his fellow Greeks to “demonstrate” a consistent relationship between their

“rational discourse” or their logos and the ways in which they live (FS 97). The

relationship is defined as one of harmony, where one is beautiful just in case the way in

42 McGushin argues that in “in defining philosophical subjectivity as autonomous reason and establishing it as the normative model of human life, the truth of our selves, Kant’s critical project contributes to and even requires the disciplinary control of life” (McGushin, Foucault’s Askēsis, 285). According to McGushin, disciplinary control consists in the calculated control of individual behaviors, and Kant promotes this when he advocates that the public use of reason must be restricted but free in its private use (see McGushin, Foucault’s Askēsis, 256-7). Foucault certainly seems to support McGushin when, in “What is Critique?”, he claims that rational and power have worked hand in glove in modernity. McGushin wrongly assumes, however, that Foucault views discipline in a pejorative way, which is simply not the case. In his later works, when Foucault discusses the “arts of existence,” he means that these arts are a form of self-discipline, rather than discipline according to external constraints. Furthermore, if my other arguments are correct, Foucault admits that the Kantian form of self-discipline might be the correct form. For accounts that defend an alternative position, see Menke, “Two Kinds of Practice,” and Sharpe, “‘Critique’ as a Technology of the Self’”.

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which one talks and conceives oneself, one’s “logoi,” is consistent with the ways in

which one lives. Socrates acquires his ability to so effectively disturb the discourse of his

fellow Greeks because he is in perfect harmony with himself, or possessing truth; that is,

“there is not the slightest discrepancy between what he says and what he does” (FS 100).

The “art” involved in an aesthetics of the self or art of life is the set of techniques that one

applies to oneself to bring a harmony between what one says and thinks and one lives

their life or conducts themselves. Life, Foucault says, is the object of art, but, as he

stresses in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, tekhnē is to be understood as “a reasonable

and rational art” (H 487/466). Foucault is not, therefore, advocating a mere aestheticism,

for is advocating that, in fact, we conduct ourselves according to principles.

How does this “ethical attitude” for a consistency in discourse and action connect

with Kant’s conceptions of critique and enlightenment? In an interview, Foucault asks

rhetorically, “[F]or what is ethics, if not the practice of freedom, the conscious practice of

freedom? […] Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is the

considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection” (EW1 284/DE4 No

356, 711-2). This relationship of freedom is one in which one directs their thought and

action according to rational reflection. When Kant exhorts his peers to have the courage

to use their reason, for Foucault he is ultimately exhorting them to relate to themselves

and transform their thoughts and actions into a relationship of consistency with the

requirements of the practical will.

If Foucault adopts this same ethos, though not necessarily the same ethical

structure, then he is must be understood as engaging in critique in order to bring

consistency between, on the one hand, what we think and say, and, on the other hand,

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what we do. This casts his critique of the subject in an entirely different light. When

Foucault claims that it is our demand of knowledge of ourselves borne of our desire to be

autonomous beings that ultimately leads to our subjection, perhaps the best interpretation

is that there is a lack of harmony between our ideals as autonomous beings and the ways

in which we actually conduct ourselves. This is, it seems to me, the most appropriate

way of rendering why Foucault never dispenses with the question of the constitution of

the subject. If we are indeed autonomous, then we need to pay attention to the ways in

we unknowingly limit ourselves. That is precisely the project of a critical ontology.

1.5.3 Two Forms of Foucaultian Critique

There are two primary ways, I think, in which we can render Foucault’s project as

critical. The first way is to see it as a form of historical critique. Historical critique is to

use historical investigation to critically target some specific object, such as a belief,

attitude, practice, tradition, institution, etc. For Foucault, as the title of his project

suggests, this is going to involve targeting “ourselves”. Given his intense focus on the

constitution of the subject, the specific aspect of ourselves that would be the target is our

self-knowledge or identities. What these historical investigations will analyze, then, is

how our conceptions of ourselves are shaped over time in our practices and in response to

specific problems and historical events.43 The goal is to provide an account, a narrative,

of how these conceptions are inherited through multifaceted historical events, practices,

problems, and social forces; in short, historical critique is genealogical critique.44

43 For a brief discussion of Foucault’s concept of problematization, see Chapter Three, Sections 3.2.2 and 3.5.2.

In

44 Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, especially Ch. 2, and Piercey, The Uses of the Past from Heidegger to Rorty.

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“What is Enlightenment?” he says that his method is critical ontology because it is

“genealogical in its design,” and that his “critique will be genealogical in the sense that

[…] 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” (EW1 315-

6/DE4 No 315, 574). Foucaultian genealogy is critical in the sense that it unearths the

“accidents, the minute deviations […] the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty

calculations that gave birth to those things which continue to exist and have value for us”

(EW2 374/DE2 No 84, 141). Genealogy “disturbs what was previously considered

immobile” because it “fragments what was thought unified” (Ibid.).

But how, exactly, does a genealogical narrative become critical? As Foucault

suggests, a genealogy disturbs self-evidences, fragments unities, and exposes contingency

in that which seems necessary. It is critical because it opens to our eyes a way of seeing

ourselves that we had not previously considered. This just pushes the question back,

however, because genealogical accounts are, it would seem, supposed to do more than

shake our self-confidence in our identities. As Bernard Williams puts it, a genealogy

discloses the radical contingencies in our self-conceptions, and exposing radical

contingencies in our self-conceptions is critical because of how we see ourselves.45

45 Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, p. 20-1.

What

makes a genealogy critical, then, is the disparity or lack of fit between the actual

historical sources of some self-conception and the attitude toward or belief that self-

conception. Foucault implies that a genealogy disturbs because it finds historical

mobility behind what was previously considered immobile, historical fragmentation at

the root of what was thought unified, and contingency in what was believed necessary.

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In short, a genealogy produces an inconsistency between the attitude or belief about some

self-conception and the historical sources of that self-conception. This interpretation of

genealogical critique, which is at the very least suggested by Foucault himself, fits nicely

with his positive account of the critical ethos, which strives for consistency between

discourse and action, or, say, self-conceptions and their actual histories.

A virtue of interpreting genealogical critique in light of Foucault’s account of the

critical ethos as striving for consistency is that it gives his account of “local critique”

some teeth. The idea of a local critique is that one does not need to appeal to any context

transcendent principles in order to evaluate some practice, behavior, belief, etc. For

example, one might criticize a form of previously unrecognized self-imposed subjection

to external authority, like those Foucault identifies, because those same agents who

unwittingly subject themselves also consciously accept that they ought to be free from

this particular subjection. In this instance, there is a contradiction or inconsistency

between the unnoticed subjection of the individuals involved, on the one hand, and their

desire to be free, on the other hand. For Foucault, a local genealogical critique exposes

the arbitrariness according to which some practice includes and excludes certain verbal

and behavioral performances (PK 83/DE3 No 193, 165). So, certain practices, such as

spiritual practices, are exorcised, on Foucault’s account, from philosophical practice at

the Cartesian moment and henceforth disqualified.46 One might certainly argue, as some

have in the Continental tradition of philosophy, that truth is not merely a relation between

propositions and objects or propositions and each other.47

46 See Kelly, “Foucault, Habermas, and the Self-Referentiality of Critique,” pp. 379-82.

One might also argue,

47 Heidegger, On the Essence of Truth , and “On the Essence of Truth” in Pathmarks.

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however, that the firmness of some criteria for excluding some kinds of conduct and not

other kinds is derived not through sound reasoning, say, but through a series of fortuitous

events. Martin Kusch, for example, argues that psychologism was dealt the death blow

not so much by sound arguments and reasoned reflection, but by political struggles and

events in the wake of World War II.48

In any case, Foucault is not specifically in the business of making arguments. He

is instead in the business of letting history do the work for him. If it is going to do this

work, however, genealogical critique must appeal to some criteria. It so happens that if

that criteria is inconsistency between the history of something and its reality in the

present, then this would force us to confront that thing, to reevaluate it. The goal, of

course, is to render consistency by pointing out inconsistencies. Hence, with autonomy

conceived as requiring consistency between discourse and action or thought and action,

Foucault is capable of undertaking critique without undertaking the project of an

analytics of truth. This is what I envision as Foucault’s modest critical program.

In cases like this, one might argue that the

conception of what is true (or stable or necessary) is inconsistent with the history of how

what is true came about. Alternatively, one might appeal to the very criteria used to

exclude and include certain performances to determine if it has been over time applied

with consistency. Perhaps the acceptability of said criteria is due to its having been

applied arbitrarily.

It is, however, easy to slip here into a more robust, and indefensible, alternative to

the kind of critique I sketched above. There are two varieties of this form of critique.

First, Foucault sometimes suggests, as he does in “What is Critique?”, that his critical 48 Kusch, Psychologism.

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project is motivated by a worry about the excesses of power. For power to be excessive

is for us to lose our ability to be self-governing. While this is obviously a conceptual

problem for any concept of autonomy, the notion of an excess of power implies some

standard by which the reach of power can be evaluated as excessive. The problem is that

Foucault offers no such criteria, for it is not apparent that it is a problem of power if one

is being conducted by others. Rather, the problem would be that one is not self-

consciously conducting oneself, which is a requirement of autonomous thought and

action. Perhaps what Foucault means, then, is that an excess of power is one that is more

deeply hidden. Foucault does think that power is the more effective to the extent that it is

hidden. If this is what Foucault means by excessive, then the critical task is simply to

disclose the inner workings of power, rather than providing some evaluation of a form of

power being good or bad. This understanding accords better with at least one thing

Foucault says, “A critique does not consist in saying that things aren’t good the way they

are. It consists in seeing on what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established,

unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based” (EW3 456/DE4 No 296,

180).

But Foucault is sometimes prone to moving from this conception of critique to a

more evaluative-heavy conception of critique. Immediately after the passage just cited,

Foucault says, “Criticism consists in uncovering […] thought and trying to change it”

(Ibid.). There are two ways in which we might understand this comment. First, we might

understand it in the way I suggested above, which would render the effort to “change”

thought by making us more aware of the sources of our self-conceptions, thoughts, and

reasons for acting, and by pointing out inconsistencies. Foucault certainly implies this.

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But Foucault also sometimes uses claims to be using genealogical critique to isolate

points of desirable change and the kinds of change that ought to, or at least might be

interested in, undertaking. Indeed, he often suggests that mere change is desirable. He

says, for example, that his critical ontology locates where change is “possible and

desirable [souhaitable], and to determine the precise form this change should take” (EW1

316/DE4 No 339, 574), and sometimes he casts the present need as ‘thinking otherwise’:

[W]hat is philosophy today – philosophical activity, I mean – if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known. (HS2 9/14-5)

I have already proposed one way to construe the “critical work that thought brings to bear

on itself,” namely, as the essential Kantian notion of a fundamental consistency between

thought or discourse and action or conduct. However, Foucault quite often suggests that

the very goal of critique is to simply induce changes and transformations in our thinking

and behaviors. To be clear, he does not appear to be saying that these changes and

transformations are merely attitudinal changes toward ourselves in light of what

genealogical critique discloses to us. Rather, he seems to be talking about real and

palpable changes in how we think and act. So, Timothy O’Leary, for example,

paraphrases this interpretation of Foucaultian critique, “We must re-imagine and

transform our present, our modes of behaviour and our ways of thinking.”49

49 O’Leary, Foucault and the Art of Ethics, p. 161; my emphasis.

Alternatively, Todd May explains that the ultimate goal of Foucaultian critique is to

shake our self-evidences so that we might “experiment” with who we are and who we

might become. The view that O’Leary and May endorse is that, at the end of the day,

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Foucaultian critique is about breaking limits open, not instituting more limits, and to

break limits is an act of experimentation. As they see it, Foucault finds our freedom as

consisting in transgressing our limits, and his critical ontology contributes to our ability

to do so.

There are two problems with this rendering of critique. First, it seems to precisely

suppose that some changes are good; that is, after all, the sense of the term “desirable” as

Foucault uses it in “What is Enlightenment?” But haven’t we just seen Foucault say that

criticism does not consist in saying that things are not good – or conversely, bad – the

way they are? We cannot know what changes are desirable if we do not know what

changes are not worth desiring. Richard Bernstein explains that the basic “problem is

that these references to desirable and new possibilities and changes are in danger of

becoming empty and vacuous unless we have some sense of which possibilities and

changes are desirable and why.”50

50 Bernstein, “Foucault,” p. 231.

Without an account of what kinds of changes and

transformations are worth taking, it is not at clear that we should change or transform

ourselves, or that there is any value in experimenting with ourselves. In short, Foucault

sometimes suggests that mere change in how we think and act is desirable, but he gives

us no reasons to believe that mere change is desirable. However, this seems to precisely

assume that things are not good enough to remain the same, which is precisely what

Foucault seems to deny. So, not only does he not provide any criteria for desirable

change (apart from inconsistency and changes in attitude), he seems to be contradicting

himself.

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Second, in suggesting this more robust form of critique Foucault runs the danger

of violating his own commitment to leaving an analytics of truth to those interested in

such a project. As I have shown, Foucault thinks that making oneself into a work of art

must proceed according to principles – it is a “rational art”. If O’Leary and May

correctly interpret Foucault, then it would appear that Foucaultian autonomy consists in

shaping oneself in whatever way one chooses, as long as one aims for consistency

between their discourse and conduct. If this is Foucault’s view, then he is contradicting

himself, for he is underhandedly providing an account of autonomy as acts of change,

transformation, and experimentation. As I have shown, Foucault consistently denies

being engaged in the project of an analytics of truth. The problem is that if he claims that

autonomy consists in the conformity of discourse and action then he has taken away with

his left hand what he offered with his right hand. For, as Kant and others in the Kantian

tradition would attest, what makes an agent autonomous is whether a subject adopts the

correct rational principles for the relationship between one’s discourse and conduct.

Kant, for example, certainly argues that freedom consists in a harmony between, on the

one hand, one’s actions and thoughts, and, on the other hand, one’s practical will. That

harmony, however, must be in accordance with universal law in order to be free. For

Kant, there is, as such, the rational requirement to conform one’s thoughts and actions

according to the demands of the rational will, and then and only then is one living a life

that is harmonious and autonomous. So, for Kant, it is if and only if the rational

principles that one uses to fashion oneself are consistent with universal law that one acts

autonomously.

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These claims point to a fundamental flaw in the view of Foucault as articulating a

form of critique that aims toward providing either desirable changes or mere

transformations. While rendering oneself harmonious might be an idealized conception

of autonomy, and perhaps the regulative ideal of all conceptions of autonomy, by

pointing to Kant the fact is underlined that it is not a minor matter what principles one

uses to fashion oneself. This is not to say that Kant is correct. Rather, and again, is to

say that Foucault has essentially left, by his own statements, the business of accounting

for autonomy to others. If he says that autonomy consists in self-transformation, and only

self-transformation, then he is contradicting himself, as it preempts the analytical inquiry

into truth by offering an alternative to it.

But perhaps there is something to be said about Foucault’s notion of self-

transformation. We might read him as claiming that if we are autonomous, and whatever

the principles of autonomous thought and action might be, then autonomy must consist in

a state of consistency between discourse and action. In this sense, we can see Foucault as

articulating the regulative ideal of autonomy, namely, the autonomous individual is

devoted to crafting herself according to rational principles and, in this respect, making

herself beautiful. Foucault is, of course, also perfectly entitled to say that this business of

waiting on others to deliver the principles of autonomy cannot wait. This is a compelling

point. Philosophers argue endlessly about such things, but we cannot wait for a complete

justification. Thus, we must develop publicly, in the Kantian sense, what rational

principles subjects ought to adopt. There will be disagreement, and sometimes radical

disagreement. But even in disagreement – whether one is a utilitarian, drawn to virtue

ethics, views oneself as bound by moral law, or some other alternative – agents ought to,

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Foucault thinks, work on themselves as pieces of art, and that must include determining

the appropriate principles of action. Despite this charitable interpretation, my criticisms

underline the fact that the Foucaultian self-transforming subject must not be conceived as

experimenting on itself willy-nilly, but rather seriously and deliberately pursuing truth

and excellence, whatever it might be. As such, the analytical pursuit of truth and a

critical ontology go hand in glove, and might even require one another.

1.6 Conclusion: A Note on the Foucault/Habermas Debate

In this chapter I defended and explicated an account of Foucaultian critique that

establishes a break with his critique of the subject. I argued that right about the time of

“What is Critique?” (1978) Foucault reorients his critique of the subject into the service

of aiding autonomy, which required that he relinquished his rejection of any and all

essential human features that would ground autonomous thought and action. As it turns

out, the break in his thought makes room for such an “analytics of truth,” which would

provide the rule of truth for autonomous action. I then went on to articulate an account of

Foucaultian critique that shows how he is capable of enabling autonomy by, firstly,

disclosing the sources of our self-conceptions, thoughts, and reasons for acting, and,

secondly, motivated by the Kantian critical ethos, using genealogical criticism to disclose

the inconsistencies in how we perceive and value ourselves in the present and the actual

genealogies of those perceptions and values. Finally, I briefly pointed out some of the

perennial problems that confront a more ambitious version of Foucaultian critique.

In this concluding section I want to point out a virtue of my interpretation. One of

the most pressing issues in Foucault scholarship concerns the viability of his critical

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project. In Section 1.3 I noted some consequences of his critique of the subject, notably

that he loses any grasp on a coherent concept of autonomy. Sympathetic interpreters and

critics alike have found his turn to Kant perplexing because of the perception of precisely

this problem. In fact, critics like Taylor, who I noted in that section, Nancy Fraser,51

Richard Bernstein,52 Thomas McCarthy,53 and, most importantly, Jürgen Habermas54

think these two strains of Foucault’s thought are fundamentally incompatible. What has

become known as the ‘Foucault/Habermas Debate’ derives from Habermas’ objection

that Foucault lacks the normative foundations to engage in critique. Not only does

Foucault consistently refuse to offer any criteria by which to measure evaluations,

Habermas claims, Foucault denies that there is, or could be, any universally acceptable

criterion for evaluations, which undermines the possibility of critique. Foucault

scholarship is flush with responses,55 many of which attempt to support a robust form of

Foucaultian critique according to which he might empower us with the tools to resist the

excesses of power and transform ourselves.56

51 Nancy Fraser, “Michel Foucault”.

My own opinion is that such responses are

a dead-end. Foucault’s critique of the subject is incompatible with his adoption of the

Kantian critique, for the former deprives the latter of precisely the view of subjectivity it

requires. The virtue of the interpretation of the arc of Foucault’s career that I have

provided in this chapter, in addition to the first form of critique sketched in the previous

section, allows us to sidestep this issue entirely. Not only does Foucault give up his

52 Bernstein, “Foucault”. 53 McCarthy, “The Critique of Impure Reason”. 54 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, and “Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present”. 55 For a helpful review of the literature, see King, “Clarifying the Foucault-Habermas Debate”. 56 Allen, The Politics of Ourselves, p. 69.

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views that would conflict with the Kantian-inspired project of an analytics of truth, which

Habermas himself takes up, he remains a critical philosopher because genealogical

critique is not – or at least ought not – do anything more than develop the historical

contingencies at the roots of our presumed stable and ahistorical self-conceptions. It is,

as such, an immanent critique with no transcendent principles required. But, importantly,

it does not deny that such principles exist. As a result, Foucault is entitled to his critical

project, just as long as he remains within the confines of his commitments –

commitments that Foucault scholarship has yet to fully recognize.

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CHAPTER TWO

FOUCAULT’S KANTIAN CRITIQUE OF THE ANALYTIC OF FINITUDE AND

PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

2.1 Introduction

In Section 1.2 of the previous chapter I sketched Foucault’s critique of the

subject. I opened that section (Section 1.2.1) with a discussion of his concept of

subjectivity, noting that, for the most part, when Foucault speaks of subjectivity he is

speaking about human nature, the human essence, or some essential human feature (FL

52/DE1 No 55, 663). He also describes the subject as bound to a self-knowledge, self-

identity, or conception of itself. In some of his works, however, he implies a more

strictly philosophical conception of the subject as a ground of experience. This

conception originates in the Cartesian philosophy and it is fully articulated in the

transcendental idealism of Kant, who undertakes a transcendental investigation into, to a

phrase of Robert Brandom’s, the “metaphysics of intentionality,” or how it is possible

that there is such a thing as object-directed experience.1

1 Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead.

This distinction shows a

fundamental ambiguity in Foucault’s conception of the subject and by extension his

critique of the subject (i.e., the self). On the one hand, Foucault most commonly uses the

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term ‘subject’ as the human conceived as an object of philosophical anthropology. On

other hand, he sometimes refers to the subject as it is conceived within transcendental

philosophy. It is not clear, however, what relation exists between the subject in

philosophical anthropology and the subject in transcendental philosophy.

There is no doubting the fact that Foucault perceives a connection, which he

traces back to the Kantian philosophy. For Foucault, there is a modern preoccupation2

2 As I noted in Chapter One, Section 1.2.4, through knowledge of the human being human conduct can be more effectively regulated.

with philosophical anthropology that is made possible by Kant’s inquiry into the

conditions of the possibility of experience and his claim that the subject grounds

experience by contributing universal and necessary forms. In The Order of Things

Foucault attacks philosophical anthropology as a confused mix of half-philosophical,

half-empirical reflections on human beings. This criticism does not, however, always

appear unified, for it also involves half-philosophical, half-historical claims, as Foucault

seems to dance between philosophical objections and a mere historical recounting of the

birth and death of philosophies of human nature. And because Foucault does not target

Kant’s philosophy in any special way, it is difficult to perceive what precisely the

objection is to transcendental subjectivity – if there is an objection at all. But because

Foucault claims that Kant’s transcendental idealism is the historical condition that allows

for the very possibility of modern philosophical anthropology, most scholars take his

rejection of philosophical anthropology as decisive evidence of his rejection of universal

and necessary or transcendental subjectivity. That is, his rejection of philosophical

anthropology is used as a premise in a modus tollens, for if Kant’s philosophy is

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responsible for modern philosophical anthropology, and Foucault believes that modern

philosophical anthropology is fundamentally confused, then it is plausible to interpret

Foucault as arguing that Kant’s philosophy is fundamentally confused. While this

opinion is pervasive in the secondary literature, no account has been given of the precise

connection – until recently.

An influential interpretation has emerged that purports to isolate Foucault’s

philosophical objection to the Kantian account of subjectivity. In her 2002 study of

Foucault’s thought, Foucault’s Critical Project, Béatrice Han notes the perplexing

character of his treatment of Kant in The Order of Things.3

3 Han Foucault’s Critical Project, “Foucault and Heidegger on Kant and Finitude,” and “The Analytic of Finitude and the History of Subjectivity”.

She claims that in that text

Foucault offers seemingly inconsistent attitudes toward the Kantian philosophy. On the

one hand, she sees Foucault as praising Kant for having decisively broken with the

metaphysical tradition. On the other hand, she understands Foucault as criticizing Kant

for his role in providing the conditions necessary for modern philosophical anthropology.

How, she wonders, are these two attitudes consistent? Han turns to Foucault’s

unpublished manuscript on Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, and

argues that in that text Foucault criticizes Kant for placing the confused nature of

anthropological thinking at the heart of his doctrine of the subject. Like the critique of

philosophical anthropology in The Order of Things, Han sees Foucault as offering a near

identical, and more direct, objection to transcendental subjectivity that, for whatever

reason, he failed to adequately express in The Order of Things. Amy Allen offers

independent confirmation of this interpretation of Foucault’s criticism of Kant, arguing

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that Foucault is best understood as offering a critique of the Kantian subject, which

exposes the empirical mediation of the transcendental forms contributed by the subject.4

In this chapter I will argue that not only is Han and Allen’s thesis fundamentally

mistaken, it has the unfortunate consequence that it commits Foucault to both a wildly

implausible interpretation of Kant’s account of transcendental subjectivity and, for that

reason, a rather unconvincing objection. When The Order of Things is read with great

care, it will be shown that there are two essential breakdowns in their thesis. First, they

fail to appreciate the difference between transcendental subjectivity and philosophical

anthropology, and that when Foucault has harsh words for Kant’s philosophy, it is for the

latter’s tendency for engaging in anthropological reflection, which is different than

transcendental reflection in important respects. However, Foucault never accuses Kant of

engaging in anthropological reflection when the latter attempts to ground experience

through transcendental argumentation. Second, the reason Han and Allen fail to

appreciate this fact is that they misconstrue the nature of his criticism of philosophical

anthropology. Foucault differentiates between the transcendental or formal conditions of

experience and what he describes as the “empirical syntheses” of experience that

constitute the essence of the “analytic of finitude”. The problem of the analytic of

finitude, in Foucault’s eyes, is that it attributes to empirical reflection on human beings a

If this is correct it would be a devastating criticism, for Kant claims to have discovered

principles necessary for the possibility of experience and which are unmixed with

experience. The soundness of this criticism would entail nothing less than the failure of

Kant’s entire philosophical project in the first Critique.

4 Allen, “Foucault and Enlightenment”.

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transcendental capacity, thus making empirical syntheses, or quasi-transcendentals

response for the constitution of experience.

The crucial thesis of the chapter is that Foucault’s objection to this mixing of

empirical and transcendental reflection is essentially Kantian. Foucault believes that the

transcendental subject is a merely formal ground of experience, and it serves both a

condition of experience and limit on knowledge. He complains that modern

philosophical anthropology fails to respect the limits Kant sets down in his formal

account of the subject. This failure is quite suggestively described by Foucault as

“precritical,” “dogmatic,” “transcendental illusion,” and “paralogism”. On my account

Foucault’s critique of the analytic of finitude is not a critique of Kantian subjectivity at

all, but rather a critique of misuses of this doctrine. Not only does philosophical

anthropology transgress the bounds of possible experience, it cashes out the essence of

the human being as a living, laboring, and language-using being, and justifies doing so

through an appeal to empirical science. Foucault complains this is a mistaken use of

transcendental analysis, for it raises empirical reflection to the level of transcendental

constitution. On my diagnosis, then, Han and Allen mistake what Foucault perceives as

Kant’s tendency toward accounting for human nature, which the former believes to be a

violation of the critical philosophy, with a criticism of the transcendental subject.

Finally, I conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of my arguments for

understanding Foucault’s complicated relationship to essential anthropological facts or

“anthropological universals”. The claim that this chapter develops is that Foucault is best

understood as a Kantian skeptic about human nature. By this it is meant that since he

adopts Kant’s claim that there are formal conditions of experience and those conditions

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place limits on knowledge, he is committed to not rejecting the possibility of human

nature and yet denying that it can be known. While this view might seem implausible to

many, I turn to his later descriptions of his nominalism about anthropological universals.

As it turns out, I argue, the mature Foucault is clear that he does not deny the possibility

of a human essence. His nominalism is not a philosophical position, but a

methodological directive for critically addressing the constitution of the subject. In other

words, he brackets the existence of all anthropological universals in order to focus on

critically engaging them. Consequently, his view about the transcendental subject is far

more modest than that attributed to him by most commentators, and it has consequences

for his position on the philosophy of human nature.


The remaining content of this chapter is divided into five sections. Section 2.2

provides a brief overview of some features of Kant’s first Critique that are relevant to

Foucault’s understanding of its importance for modern philosophy. I focus in particular

on Kant’s account of the necessary conditions of intentional experience, which is

important for how Foucault explains the latent philosophical anthropology at the heart of

modern philosophy. This allows for an easier transition into a discussion that is aimed to

clarify the “analytic of finitude,” which is one of the most dense and convoluted parts of

The Order of Things and which presents some interpretative difficulties for understanding

his view of the Kantian philosophy. I indicate some of the deep similarities between

Foucault’s representation of the analytic of finitude and the Transcendental Analytic of

the first Critique, while noting that, given the structure of the analytic of finitude, it is

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unclear if and how Foucault targets the Kantian transcendental subject. Section 2.3 offers

a summary of the alleged objection to the transcendental subject that Han and Allen have

recently advanced. Section 2.4 provides two separate responses to their interpretation. I

argue, firstly, that Foucault does not criticize Kant’s account of subjectivity, and both

Han and Allen fail to appreciate that Foucault is critical of what he perceives as Kant’s

tendency to engage in philosophical reflections on human nature; secondly, Foucault

distinguishes between transcendental constitution and quasi-transcendental constitution

or “empirical syntheses”. He attacks anthropology, I claim, for its quasi-transcendental

approach, for it fails to respect the division of the transcendental and the empirical.

Section 2.5 outlines Foucault’s objection that the analytic of finitude fails to respect this

division, and I point to the robust Kantianism that Foucault appeals to in order to make

his case. Section 2.6 closes the chapter with a discussion of what I have noted is

Foucault’s Kantian skepticism about human nature, which I link to the modest account of

Foucaultian critique I provided in Chapter One.

2.2 The Copernican Revolution and the Analytic of Finitude5

Foucault says that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason “marks the threshold of our

modernity” (OT 242/MC 255). This is due to the fact that Kant is the first to ask, “What

is the ground of the relation of that in us which we call ‘representation’ to the object?” (C

5 My presentation of Kant’s philosophy is meant to stay near Foucault’s in The Order of Things while filling in some of the important gaps needed to understand his discussion of the analytic of finitude. In this regard, I take some liberties in interpreting the first Critique. Notably, I center the problem of that book on intentionality. This is not a standard line in the scholarship on the first Critique, although it has been defended by David Car (See Carr, The Paradox of Subjectivity). In any case, I think The Order of Things justifies the focus on intentionality and that greater clarity can be made of Foucault’s convoluted representation of modernity in doing so. With this point in mind, I am using the term ‘representation’ in a narrow sense. Kant understands intuitions to be representations, whereas by ‘representation’ I understand it in the Foucaultian sense, namely, as object-directed consciousness.

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71). This question, Foucault thinks, comes to preoccupy modern philosophers in a

peculiar way. Prior to Kant, the principal philosophical dispute concerns the sources of

knowledge in representations or the intentional states that characterize conscious

experience. Where the rationalists maintain that it is possible to possess a priori

representations of objects, the empiricists contend that all representations are acquired

through sense impressions. Unlike his predecessors, Foucault says, Kant does not seek to

resolve philosophical problems by determining the sources of the contents of

representations by examining representations themselves, but rather by trying to

determine the “foundation and justification” of the relation of the representation to its

object or “what renders [representation] possible in general” (OT 241/MC 254).6

The shift of focus from philosophical investigations into the contents of

representations to what makes representations possible is what Kant famously describes

as a Copernican revolution in philosophy. The assumption of Kant’s predecessors is that

the mind is passive with regard to representations. Where all previous thinking has

“assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects” (CPR Bxvi), Kant says

perhaps the disputes among philosophers about the sources of cognition might be settled

by “assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition” (CPR Bxvi). But his claim

is stronger than this. He argues that objects must conform to our minds as a condition of

having representations at all. The thesis, then, is that intentional experience is possible

More

about this must be said in order to understand the importance of Kant’s philosophy for

Foucault’s articulation of the analytic of finitude.

6 According to Foucault, both the rationalists and empiricists assume that epistemic matters are settled through arguments that support the sources of the contents of representations in thinking alone (rationalists) or exclusively in sense impressions (empiricists). See OT 63-7/MC 77-81.

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only if the mind itself supplies the forms according to which representations can be said

at all to be about objects.

The manner of establishing this thesis is to proceed through the use of

“transcendental cognition”. This kind of inquiry is the examination of the “mode of

cognition of objects” or the philosophical preoccupation “not so much with objects but

rather with our a priori concepts of objects in general” (CPR A11/B25). As such, these

modes or forms are to be disclosed in judgments about the nature of intentional

experience but of which “no exception at all [to them] is allowed to be possible” (CPR

B4) and “no experience or sensation at all is mixed in” with those judgments (CPR

A11/B24). Such judgments will therefore be pure (i.e., propositions independent of

sensible influence) and possess universality and necessity, which means these judgments

are incontrovertible and hold for all embodied rational beings. Kant therefore claims that

“although all our cognition commences with experiences […] it does not on that account

all arise from experience” (CPR B1). Put slightly differently, the judgments about

experience that are derived through transcendental philosophy will not assume any of the

empirical data received in experience.

His analysis of the grounds of representation covers two major portions of the

first Critique, the Transcendental Aesthetic and the first book of the Transcendental

Logic, the Transcendental Analytic.7

7 The second part of the Transcendental Logic is the Transcendental Dialectic, which is briefly described in Section 2.5 below.

In the Aesthetic Kant tackles the nature of

sensibility, which is the “capacity (receptivity) to acquire representations through the way

in which we are affected by objects” (CPR A19/B33). An immediate representation of an

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object is what Kant describes as an “intuition,” and “all thought […] must ultimately be

related to intuitions, thus, in our case, to sensibility, since there is no other way in which

objects can be given to us” (Ibid.). What he argues in the Aesthetic is that there are pure

forms of sensible intuition, which he identifies as space and time. These pure intuitions

are antecedent requirements of having sensible intuitions, such that sensibility must itself

already possesses a spatial and temporal character that would make sensations capable of

being spatial and temporal in quality.

While all representations must be related to receptivity or sensible intuitions in

order for representations to ultimately be directed at objects the possibility of

representations requires the spontaneity of the faculty of the understanding. Because the

understanding makes it possible to recognize a representation qua representation, Kant

describes it as the “faculty for bringing forth representations itself” (CPR A51/B75), and,

although “[w]ithout sensibility no object would be given to us,” Kant says that “without

understanding none would be thought” (CPR A51/B75). The understanding is defined as

the faculty of concepts, the latter of which are further specified as rules. Kant’s key

claim is that the object-directed nature of our experience requires the imposition of

original, a priori concepts, which he deems “categories,” on the matter of receptivity

(CPR A92/B125). Otherwise, he says, our experience would be entirely capable of being

disorganized and incoherent. And his claim about the categories is robust: these pure

concepts are responsible for the constitution of objects, not in terms of their existence, but

their structure; alternatively, representations cannot be about objects without the

categories making the contents of receptivity into objects. So, when concepts are added

to intuitions, cognition results.

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In the Transcendental Deduction of the categories, which is the heart of the

Transcendental Analytic, Kant attempts to answer the question of the rightfulness or

legitimacy (quid juris) of the categories in their application to experience (see CPR A84-

5/B116-7). The question of their rightfulness is whether the categories possess objective

validity or hold with necessity for all possible experience.8

8 The structure of this argument is one of the most disputed issues in Kant scholarship. I recommend Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge; Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism; Proops, “Kant’s Legal Metaphor and the Nature of a Deduction,” and Dicker, Kant’s Theory of Knowledge.

The argument is complex and

we need not significantly engage it; however, he maintains, in short, that the object-

directedness of experience requires an a priori synthesis or combination of intuitions into

a unity that is fit for the application of concepts, and the categories are the a priori rules

for the synthesis of intuitions. His most important premise rides on the insight that what

it means that a representation is about an object is that there is some capacity intending

the object. Although the contents of our representations are subject to significant change

and variation, Kant contends that there must be an underlying invariable unity to our

experience in order for us to recognize that it is object-directed. Indeed, Kant thinks that

one would be incapable of recognizing that their representations undergo significant

modification if it were not for the fact that they grasp their self as being affected by those

modifications. According to Kant, this means that “[t]he I think must be able to

accompany all my representations; otherwise something would be represented in me that

could not be thought at all” (CPR B131-2). The claim is that representations are always

for some ‘I’ who, as it were, makes those representations about some object. In all of

one’s representations, Kant claims, there is a unified subject of experience, which

receives the titles of “transcendental apperception,” “transcendental unity of self-

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consciousness” (CPR B132), or “transcendental subject”. This irreducible subject allows

makes all representations self-attributable, and in doing so threads into each

representation a pole from which representations are directed at objects. So, the

transcendental subject threads itself through representations through acts of synthesizing

representations. Kant takes it as obviously the case that our representations are not

recognized as belonging to multiple thinking subjects, but rather that our representations

always belong to one and the same I. He says that “the combination of a manifold in

general can never come to us through the senses” and “we can represent nothing as

combined in the object without having previously combined it ourselves” (CPR B130).

He understands there to be three fundamental synthesizing acts of the ‘I think’.

The first is the synthesis of apprehension, which individuates the contents of sensibility

into discrete moments; the second is the synthesis of reproduction, which enables the

retention of those discrete moments; and the third is the synthesis of recognition in the

concept, which allows for the identification of a common property among those discrete

moments. The comment element, as Kant spells out over many pages, is that all

representations are underwritten by rules for the collation of intuitions into an objective

time-order. This objective time-order is the unity that the ‘I think’ renders. For this

objective time-order to obtain for representations, Kant argues that any change must be

considered as an alteration of an underlying substance, which provides the time-order

with permanence, and that all changes are bound by the law of cause and effect, which

makes the time-order necessary and irreversible.9

9 I use the verbiage of Gardner, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason, for my explanations.

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Foucault therefore says that it is “the analysis of the transcendental subject that

isolates the foundation of a possible synthesis between representations” (OT 244/MC

256). Without the pure intuitions of space and time, the categories, and the

transcendental subject, experience would be a chaos of sense impressions that possessed

no recognizable coherence, and Foucault sees that, at least historically speaking, these

arguments are the foundation of modern philosophy. It is “Kant’s discovery of a

transcendental field,” Foucault says, that “sanctions” the move beyond the mere analysis

of representations to the question of what makes representations possible (OT 242/MC

255). In this regard he considers Kant’s philosophy to be an instance of genuine

philosophical progress, as transcendental philosophy makes possible critical reflection on

the assumptions of metaphysical thinking.10

10 Foucault endorses Kant’s criticisms of traditional metaphysics. See Section 2.5.

But despite this approbation, Foucault says

that “the Kantian critique carried the possibility – or the peril – of an anthropology”

(EW2 257/DE1 No 30, 446) and that “Kant ended by closing this opening” of the true

potential of transcendental critique “when he ultimately relegated all critical

investigations to an anthropological question” (EW2 76/DE1 No 13, 239). The character

of this “anthropological question” is what Foucault comes to describe as the “analytic of

finitude,” an “analytic of the human being,” “an analytic of man’s mode of being” (OT

338/MC 349), or “[a]nthropology as an analytic of man” (OT 340/MC 351). Although

Foucault clearly evokes Kant in using the term ‘analytic’ to describe anthropological

questioning, as I shall establish below, it is clear that there is some degree of hostility

toward Kant. But, it is neither transparent why he is critical of Kant nor what relevance

Foucault’s discussion of the analytic of finitude has to do with the doctrine of

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transcendental subjectivity. In the remainder of this section I shall only try to show how

Kant’s Analytic is crucial for understanding Foucault’s presentation of the structure of

the analytic of finitude.

First, one must recognize that the use of the term ‘analytic’ is an obvious nod to

Kant. For Kant, an analytic is an analysis of the elements according to which an object is

given to be thought and which also stands as the touchstone of truth (see CPR A62/B87).

Similarly, by describing a dimension of modern thought as an “analytic of finitude,”

Foucault is saying that it is through human finitude that objects are given to experience

and which also stands as the touchstone of truth. Additionally, the Transcendental

Analytic and the analytic of finitude are both forms of transcendental analysis, which

means that the analytic of finitude will ultimately direct itself at the thinking subject in

order to determine the possibility of representations.

At first glance the phrase “analytic of finitude” seems to be a description of

Kant’s efforts in the Analytic, namely, to establish that the subjective conceptual

conditions of experience are at the same time the touchstone of truth and also the limits of

knowledge. But this is an incorrect perception. Notice first that Foucault describes the

transcendental aspect of the analytic of finitude not in terms of formal transcendental

structures, but those that traverse the border of the empirical and the transcendental. Life,

labor, and language are the specific structures Foucault identifies. By ‘life’ he means that

human beings are organisms that will their own survival, ‘labor’ that they undertake

activities to satisfy their biological and psychological desires, and ‘language’ to indicate

that communicative actions are undertaken to convey thoughts. Each of these is what

Foucault describes as a “transcendental” (OT 244/MC 257) because they are used to

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ground the knowledge of biology, economics, and philology. As grounding, these

transcendentals must therefore be understood as dealing with a problem similar to that of

the Analytic. The goal of the analytic of finitude, like the Kantian Analytic, is to explain

the possibility of the object-directed nature of representations. With the analytic of

finitude, however, representations are underwritten with more than the categories, such

that life, labor, and language are that which first direct human beings toward engaging

objects.11

Foucault even describes the analytic of finitude in a way that suggests he is

interested in the deduction of these post-Kantian ‘categories’. For example, he says:

Thus, the new ground of representations, or the reason that consciousness is

about objects, is because our will to survive, desires to satisfy our wants, and desire to

communicate direct us toward objects.

The modern themes of an individual who lives, speaks, and works in accordance with the laws of an economics, a philology, and a biology, but who also, by a sort of internal torsion and overlapping, has acquired the right, through the interplay of those very laws, to know them and to subject them to total clarification. (OT 310/MC 321; my emphasis)12

Again, he says that “anthropology [is] a mode of thought in which the rightful limitations

of acquired knowledge (and consequently of all empirical knowledge) are at the same

time the concrete forms of existence, precisely as they are given in that same empirical

knowledge” (OT 248/MC 261). As transcendentals, he thinks that life, labor, and

11 It is unclear from the text if Foucault sees life, labor, and language as replacing the categories. I would argue that he does not, since it is precisely Kant’s Analytic that makes the analytic of finitude possible. If Kant understands the categories as making possible the cognition of objects, Foucault represents (although not in his voice) life, labor, and language as conditions of engaging and interacting with objects. 12 Foucault’s discussions of biology, economics, and philology are too complicated to explicate here. See OT/MC, Ch. 8 for his considered treatment. See also Gutting, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason, Ch. 5.

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language synthesize experience,13

The point seems to be that the status of the rightfulness of transcendental

conditions of life, labor, and language is dependent upon the status of the epistemic

claims of the corresponding empirical sciences. Or, it is only through the philosophical

analysis of the claims of the empirical sciences that life, labor, and language become

discernible as conditions of possible experience, and therefore they are dependent upon

the empirical sciences themselves. So, man – this living, laboring, language-using being

– is the condition of possible knowledge, but he only discovers his constitutive nature

through the advancement of biological, economic, and philological science. Foucault

concludes that the “analysis of what man is in his essence [as living, laboring, and

speaking] becomes the analytic of everything that can, in general, be presented to man’s

experience” (OT 341/MC 352). In other words, objects are only given to the human

being that he is always already living, laboring, and communicative.

for they are the functions that explain intentional

consciousness. What is different in the deduction of these transcendental conditions as

compared to those in the first Critique is that the rightfulness of the former, Foucault

says, is not acquired through a transcendental deduction, but through an empirical

deduction (i.e., the ascension form particulars to more universal concepts) from content

provided by the empirical sciences. This is why he says that life, labor, and language are

“concrete forms of existence” that are “given in that same empirical knowledge,” and that

their rightfulness is caught in the “interplay” of the very claims of biology, economics,

and philology.

13 It might not be entirely coincidental that Foucault describes three transcendentals, which correspond to the three transcendental syntheses, though it is unclear what correlation might exist between these two sets of syntheses.

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The concepts and structure of Foucault’s description of the analytic of finitude

leave little doubt that Kant’s philosophy factors heavily into his analyses. But for what

precise reason is Foucault critical of man and what exactly does man have to do with the

transcendental subject? Before I offer my own interpretation of the connection, let me

provide a view that has recently garnered considerable attention in the secondary

literature.

2.3 Han and Allen on Foucault’s Alleged Criticism of Kant

The principal chapter in which Foucault criticizes the analytic of finitude is a

terribly convoluted piece of writing. He paints in broad brushstrokes and is frustratingly

vague. This is especially the case regarding his discussions of Kant’s philosophy. Much

of what drives the perception that there is a critique of Kant in The Order of Things is, I

think, the mere proximity of his discussions of the analytic of finitude and the Kantian

philosophy, the fact that he freely (and ironically) uses Kantian language in doing so, and

the widely held view that Foucault is critical of anything that supports subjectivity.

Given the structural similarities between the Transcendental Analytic and the analytic of

finitude, it is clear that in Foucault’s mind the latter is made possible by the former. So

when he claims that the history he provides in The Order of Things shows that “[b]efore

the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist” (OT 308/MC 319) and is a “recent

invention” that man might soon disappear (OT 386/MC 398), it is not implausible that

Foucault is attacking Kant’s doctrine of subjectivity. If Kant is responsible for making

the analytic of man possible and this analytic is deficient, then it seems quite right to

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believe that Kant is implicated in Foucault’s criticisms. I shall briefly present Béatrice

Han’s and Amy Allen’s quite similar presentations of this alleged criticism.

The starting point of Han’s analysis is what she sees as the “ambiguous” status of

Kant’s philosophy in The Order of Things.14

Anthropology as an analytic of man has certainly played a constituent role in modern thought, since to a large extent we are still not free from it. […] This had already been formulated by Kant in his Logic,

She says that Foucault seems to praise Kant

and yet also makes him the principal culprit in the genesis of man and the analytic of

finitude. While these are not incompatible attitudes on the face of things, she is confused

by Foucault’s criticism of Kant in the analytic of finitude, because it seems to undermine

any reason to praise Kant in the first place. She is perplexed especially by the following

passage:

15

This question […] runs through thought from the early nineteenth century: this is because it produces, surreptitiously and in advance, the confusion of the empirical and the transcendental, even though Kant had demonstrated the division between them [Cette question…c’est qu’elle opère, en sous-main et par avance, la confusion de l’empirique et du transcendantal dont Kant avait pourtant montré le partage]. (OT 340/MC 351-2)

when to his traditional trilogy of questions he added an ultimate one: the critical questions (What can I know? What must I do? What am I permitted to hope?) then found themselves referred to a fourth, and inscribed, as it were, ‘to its account’: Was is der Mensch?

Han says that Foucault claims that Kant reduces the critical philosophy to “anthropology”

and therefore implies that Kant makes the mistake that underlies the entirety of the

analytic of finitude. According to her, the mistake of the analytic of finitude is the

presumption that judgments derived through transcendental analysis possess universal

14 Han, Foucault’s Critical Project, p. 18. 15 Kant says, “The field of philosophy in this cosmopolitan sense can be brought down to the following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope? 4. What is man? Metaphysics answers the first question, morals the second, religion the third, and anthropology the fourth. Fundamentally, however, we could reckon all of this as anthropology, because the first three questions relate to the last one” (JL 9:23-5.).

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validity and, as such, are entirely pure of, or completely divorced from, the information

provided by experience. However, in the second paragraph Foucault criticizes the

analytic of finitude for violating Kant’s very demonstration of the division between the

transcendental and empirical. But if Kant demonstrates the divide, Han wonders, how is

it that he is also unable to hold this divide apart? She says that for Foucault “the same

Kant had, on the one hand, ‘demonstrated the divide’ of the empirical and the

transcendental, and on the other, blurred the foundations of the same division by

recentering the three critical questions around that of man!”16

Han’s tactic is to show that Foucault actually believes that a completely pure

transcendental analysis is not possible. The problem is that he does not actually offer this

criticism in The Order of Things, but only suggests it. But it does exist, she claims, in his

unpublished commentary on Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View

(hereafter, Commentary).

If she is right, Foucault has

adopted a confused position.

In the Commentary, Foucault points out that Kant lectured on anthropology from

1772 until 1796, and his lectures were published in 1798. The first Critique was

published in 1781. The overlap in the anthropology lectures and the composition of the

first Critique leads Foucault to speculate, “In 1772, was there already, perhaps even

subsisting in the very depths of the Critique, a certain concrete image of man which no

subsequent philosophical elaboration would substantially alter and which emerges at last,

more or less unchanged, in Kant’s last published text?” (IKA 19). Using this speculative

question as her starting point, Han interprets Foucault as claiming that the purity of 16 Han, Foucault’s Critical Project, pp. 18-9.

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transcendental analysis and the impurity of empirical reflection are run together with the

introduction of a new concept in the Anthropology, what Foucault calls “the originary”.17

He says, for example, “The a priori, in the order of knowledge, becomes, in the order of

concrete existence, an originary which is not chronologically first, but which, having

appeared in the succession of figures of the synthesis, reveals itself as already there”

(IKA 68). On Han’s reading, the originary is a set of empirical principles that mediate

transcendental analysis and which therefore constitute the actual pure and spontaneous

organization of experience. These empirical principles are something like the general

claim that subjectivity, as a clear and distinct representation of one’s irreducible self, is

the starting point of all transcendental analysis. According to Han’s interpretation of

Foucault, this starting point arises as a need for a ground of experience in the wake of the

failure of metaphysics, and it is confused as an a priori starting place. The problem,

Foucault supposedly claims, is that there are not clear and distinct representations of

one’s self, but only historically mediated representations. Thus, Han describes the

originary as the hidden return of the empirical into the transcendental, and “it defeats the

foundational core of the Kantian strategy [of the first Critique] by generating a new

inability to sustain the a priori perspective necessary for securing a universal epistemic

ground”.18

17 Han, “Foucault and Heidegger on Kant and Finitude,” p. 180.

Again, Han says, “The conditions of the possibility of experience (the

transcendental organization of subjectivity) are referred back to the empirical existence of

18 Han, Foucault’s Critical Project, pp. 128-9.

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the subject [via the originary or historically determined self-reflection], which in turn

invalidates the very possibility of a pure transcendental determination.”19

Amy Allen has recently offered a similar interpretation. She says that although

“Foucault is clearly critical of Kant” in The Order of Things, he is critical in a particular

way.

20 Allen claims Foucault offers a critique of Kant’s first Critique, or “an

interrogation of the limits and conditions of possibility of that which Kant himself took as

his own starting point, namely, the transcendental subject itself.”21 This Foucaultian

critique, which she extrapolates from the Commentary and The Order of Things, reveals

that Kant cannot help but let his transcendental analysis of the subject slide into a quasi-

transcendental, empirical account. According to Allen, Foucault does not deny that the

subject constitutes its experience, yet her interpretation of Foucault has him claiming that

the elements from which the subject constitutes its experience are historically and

socially inherited forms. Basically, Kant mistakenly believes that transcendental analysis

is capable of yielding universality and necessity when, in fact, it is mediated by

historicity and therefore is incapable of such robust yields. If this is the correct

interpretation, then the truth of Foucault’s claims would “void Kant’s conception of the

transcendental,” Allen says, “inasmuch as Kant’s use of this term is exclusively tied to

non-empirical reflection on the limits and conditions of possible for [sic] experience”.22

19 Han, “The Analytic of Finitude and the History of Subjectivity,” p. 180. Cf. Han, Foucault’s Critical Project, p. 32.

As Allen represents it, Foucault believes that reflection is bound to historical and cultural

20 Allen, “Foucault and Enlightenment,” p. 187. 21Ibid., p. 189. 22 Ibid., p. 192.

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experience operating below the level of awareness and which infects the purity of

transcendental analysis.

It is clear that Han and Allen arrive at the same conclusion. Foucault rejects the

universality and necessity of the transcendental subject. And their representation of the

criticism is basically identical. Kant cannot help but confuse the transcendental with the

empirical, for as it turns out, empirical experience ineluctably mediates transcendental

reflection. What appears as transcendental is merely an appearance, and there are no

genuinely transcendental claims that hold with universality and necessity. Consequently,

it is mistake from the beginning for Kant to begin with the subject’s ability to engage in

pure reflection, since the kind of pure reflection required of transcendental reflection is

not possible.

2.4 Two Responses, Two Distinctions

Given the lack of definite connection between the Kantian account of the

transcendental subject and Foucault’s obvious philosophical distaste for modern

philosophical anthropology, I think we need to be extremely careful to not render

potential connections into obvious connections. As Han herself seems to admit, the

precise connection between the transcendental subject and philosophical anthropology is

seemingly confused. I think that if we reexamine the connection, motivated by the lack

of apparent disconnect, we might find evidence that Foucault does not intend his critique

of philosophical anthropology to extend to Kantian subjectivity. That is the claim I will

defend in this section. First, I maintain that Foucault importantly distinguishes modern

philosophical anthropology from transcendental subjectivity, while criticizing Kant for a

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tendency to undertake an anthropological project but not criticizing his account of

subjectivity as being anthropological. Second, I maintain that Foucault distinguishes

between transcendental subjectivity as providing the formal conditions of experience and

philosophical anthropology, which mistakenly raises empirical claims to the level of

transcendental constitution. This fact strongly suggests that anthropology fails to

appreciate that transcendental constitution is merely formal, a claim I will develop in

more detail in Section 2.5.

2.4.1 First Response: The Distinction Between Philosophical Anthropology and Transcendental Subjectivity

It is not clear that Foucault criticizes the doctrine of subjectivity in either the

Commentary or The Order of Things. Let me first comment on the former. Admittedly,

he does say that anthropology accompanies the critical philosophy at every turn, and that

the critical philosophy tends toward resolving itself into a critical metaphysics of man

(IKA 120). Foucault makes such remarks in several places. In addition to the passage

that contains his alleged self-contradiction, another a typical remark in this regard is that

“the Kantian critique carried the possibility – or the peril – of an anthropology” (EW2

257/DE1 No 30, 446). It is important in these comments that Foucault says that

anthropology is a mere danger or tendency in Kant’s philosophy. At the height of his

analysis of Kant’s critical philosophy in the Commentary, Foucault explicitly says that

Kant’s philosophical anthropology attempts to “give critical thought the value of positive

knowledge” of the human essence, which, if Kant is followed on this point, one “will

have forgotten the essential point of [Kant’s] lesson” (IKA 118). Now, Foucault does not

say much about what this lesson consists of. Notice, however, that the language of

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‘lesson’ bears a striking resemblance to his statement that Kant “demonstrated” the divide

between the empirical and transcendental, and it is the violation of this divide that is the

mistake of anthropology. Indeed, to even say that Kant taught a lesson suggests the fact

that Foucault believes Kant to have said something true. So, quite plausibly Foucault is

saying that to forget this lesson (and demonstration of the divide between the

transcendental and the empirical) and undertake a metaphysics of human nature is to run

together the empirical and the transcendental in the question, “What is man?” In The

Order of Things, this is precisely what Foucault claims when he complains about Kant’s

raising of the importance of the question of man in the Jäsche Logic. Foucault is not

criticizing the doctrine of the subject; instead, he is criticizing Kant for taking the project

of philosophical anthropology seriously.

Let me articulate this claim in more detail. It would seem that when Foucault

says that Kant opens “the possibility of another metaphysics” (OT 243/MC 256; my

emphasis) with his critical philosophy and that this philosophy is to be interpreted as “the

granting of an indefinite respite to metaphysics” (EW2 76/DE1 No 13, 241), he is

criticizing the Kantian doctrine of the subject. But the emphasis in the first quote is

important. At this point in The Order of Things Foucault is contrasting the metaphysics

of early modern philosophy with a new kind of metaphysics, which seems to be the

implicit metaphysic of the analytic of finitude. Foucault does not say that the first

Critique is included within the analytic of finitude, although it makes this analytic

possible, which is a subtle point that must be respected. Consider that prior to his

statement that Kant ultimately grants an indefinite respite to metaphysics, Foucault

prefaces it by saying that “Kant ended by closing this opening [made possible by critical

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philosophy] when, all things considered, he ultimately relegated all critical investigations

to an anthropological question” (Ibid.; my emphasis). It seems appropriate to infer that

the “anthropological question” here is, “What is man?”, which Foucault discusses in The

Order of Things. So, when Foucault says that “all things considered” Kant relegates all

critical philosophy to this question, he is making a point about the seeming importance of

philosophical anthropology for Kant, namely, that Kant thought the question of man is

considerably important. Foucault himself makes this point in the Commentary, when he

implies that the tendency toward philosophical anthropology is present insofar as Kant

lectured on the topic even before he wrote the first Critique. Foucault never says

anything directly about the first Critique succumbing to anthropological questioning or

the analytic of finitude; rather, the question of man is always present for Kant.

Anthropology is described by Foucault as a peril or danger of Kant’s philosophy, and

Foucault believes that Kant succumbs to this peril. But, as Foucault says in the

controversial passage from The Order of Things, this is a mistake precisely because Kant

demonstrated the divide between the transcendental and the empirical. In other words,

Kant is violating the prescriptions of his own philosophy.

Whether Foucault’s intuition about Kant’s alleged tendency is justified is not

particularly relevant to the argument at hand. The essential point is that the passages that

Han and Allen use to motivate their interpretations are misunderstood. Foucault is

speaking about a specific inquiry of Kant’s philosophy as failing to meet its own

requirements, and we misunderstand him if we confuse the inquiry of philosophical

anthropology as identical to the doctrine of subjectivity. One intuition that supports this

claim is that the question of man is not identical to the question of the first Critique,

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“What can I know?” Trying to determine the essence of the human being does not bear

on the attempt to answer the question of the grounds of knowledge. Self-understanding

might be a motivation to turn to the mind itself as the ground of knowledge, but the

resulting claims are not articulations of the human essence. Indeed, we shall in the next

section that precisely the opposite is the case. In any case, this is how we should

understand the peril of anthropology. When we understand that Foucault does not reduce

the doctrine of transcendental subjectivity to the confused metaphysics of human nature

that defines the analytic of finitude, we can see why Han saddles Foucault with a blatant

inconsistency of a magnitude that rarely appears in print. She understands Foucault to be

talking about the transcendental subject when he discusses the confusion of philosophical

anthropology, in fact, he is talking about only philosophical anthropology.

2.4.2 Second Response: The Distinction Between Empirical and Formal Syntheses

There is a better reason to discount the claim that Foucault criticizes the Kantian

doctrine of the transcendental subject than the distinction between anthropology and

subjectivity, namely, Foucault upholds this doctrine. In the first case, there is the

evidence that Foucault claims that Kant demonstrated the divide between the

transcendental and the empirical, which suggests a genuine approval of this division.

When we recognize this fact (and that it is not a contradiction), we might see that

Foucault makes claims that quite plausibly are endorsements of the transcendental

subject. In fact, there are other clues in The Order of Things that suggest as much.

Before he explains that the anthropological question introduced in the Jäsche Logic runs

through all of modernity, Foucault says, “It was necessary for empirical syntheses to be

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assured elsewhere than within the sovereignty of the ‘I think’” (OT 340/MC 351;

translated modified; my emphasis). This one sentence is incredibly significant because,

in the first case, Foucault contrasts empirical syntheses with the transcendental syntheses

performed by the ‘I think,’ which is suggested insofar as the former is described as

“elsewhere” than the latter. In the second case, he draws this contrast before he criticizes

the analytic of finitude, which strongly suggests that his subsequent critical remarks are

aimed at the empirical syntheses of the analytic of finitude and not the syntheses of the ‘I

think’. This division between empirical syntheses and the transcendental syntheses of the

‘I think’ is therefore of vital importance.

We have already seen Kant’s descriptions of the transcendental syntheses that

make experience possible. An empirical synthesis is, like a transcendental synthesis, a

unity of consciousness in which sense impressions are synthesized into an object. But

this unity is not a condition of possible experience; rather, it is a unity informed by sense

experience itself. One of way of putting the difference is that where the categories and

transcendental syntheses explain the possibility of the object-directedness of

consciousness, empirical syntheses are specific object-directed states of consciousness.

Empirical syntheses are ‘taking-as-such-and-such,’ where transcendental synthesis

explains how ‘taking-as-such-and-such’ is even possible.

Now, notice that Foucault distinguishes the empirical syntheses of the analytic of

finitude from the transcendental syntheses. He says empirical syntheses take the:

form of a being whose enigmatic reality constitutes, prior to all knowledge, the order and the connection of what it has to know; moreover, they concern the domain of a posteriori truths and the principles of their synthesis – and not the a priori synthesis of all possible experience. (OT 244/MC 257; my emphasis)

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The claim could not be clearer: the empirical syntheses of representations are not,

despite resemblances, identical to the a priori or transcendental syntheses of

representations by the transcendental subject. In fact, Foucault consistently uses the term

“formal” to indicate that which is genuinely transcendental. For example, he explains

that Kant establishes the possibility of a connection among representations by uncovering

“a transcendental field in which the subject, which is never given to experience (since it

is not empirical), but which is finite (since there is no intellectual intuition), determines in

its relation to an object = x all the formal conditions of experience in general” (OT

243/MC 256; my emphasis). What Foucault describes here as the “formal conditions of

experience in general” is equivalent, in part, to the transcendental a priori synthesis of all

possible experience outlined in the Transcendental Deduction. My suggestion, then, is

that we treat Foucault’s use of the term ‘formal’ as referring to the Kantian doctrine of

the subject, and “empirical synthesis” as referring to the transcendentals of life, labor, and

language. And this appears to be correct, as Foucault himself admits that the empirical

syntheses that run through modernity are discovered elsewhere than with the sovereignty

of the ‘I think’.

This interpretation enjoys additional support from some commonly, and oddly,

ignored passages from The Archaeology of Knowledge. There, Foucault distinguishes the

“historical a priori” from the “formal a priori”. He says that the historical a priori

“enables us to understand how the formal a prioris may have in history points of contact,

places of insertion, irruption, or emergence, domains or occasions of operation” (AK

128/AS 128). But if it is true that Kant cannot uphold the transcendental a priori under

the weight of Foucault’s criticism in The Order of Things, for what possible reason would

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Foucault say that the formal a priori makes contact with history, since, according to Han

and Allen, the formal a priori does not even exist except in a confused, and therefore

informal or impure, sense?23 Foucault straightforwardly says that the historical a priori

“cannot take account […] of the formal a prioris” (AK 128/AS 128); that is, it does not

purport to possess such a formal explanatory function. Instead, as already indicated, the

most the invocation of the historical a priori can explain is how the formal a priori comes

into play at a moment in history or makes contact with historically local experiences. He

continues, “The formal a priori and the historical a priori neither belong to the same

level nor share the same nature: if they intersect, it is because they occupy two different

dimensions” (Ibid.). Perhaps not coincidentally, this passage reflects Foucault’s claim in

the Preface to the second volume of The History of Sexuality. He says, “That [thought]

should have this historicity does not mean it is deprived of all universal form, but, rather,

that the putting into play of these universal forms is itself historical” (EW1 201/DE4 No

340, 580). The idea is that there are two domains of transcendental analysis, the

conditions of possible experience and the historical conditions of experience, and that

these domains do not, or ought not, intersect.24

Clearly, then, Foucault never rejects, and never intended to reject, the formal a

priori as defended by Kant. And, when he says that Kant demonstrated the divide

between the empirical and the transcendental, he is not contradicting himself. He is

23 One might complain that Foucault is talking here of the formal nature of logic and mathematics and not transcendental principles. The problem with this complaint is that above we saw that Foucault refers to the transcendental conditions of experience as formal conditions. 24 For more on the latter, see Chapter Three, especially 3.5. Allow me to note that I am not drawing any correlation between the historical a priori and the analytic of finitude.

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straightforwardly asserting its truth. The question now, however, is what exactly does he

find wrong with the analytic of man and philosophical anthropology?

2.5 Foucault’s Kantian Critique of the Analytic of Finitude

My interpretation of Foucault’s critique of the analytic of finitude largely turns on

the claims of the previous section and some clues that Foucault provides in his critical

remarks aboutit. To begin, consider again the following passage:

This question [What is man?] runs through thought from the early nineteenth century: this is because it produces, surreptitiously and in advance, the confusion of the empirical and the transcendental, even though Kant had demonstrated the division between them. By means of this question, a form of reflection was constituted which is mixed in its levels and characteristic of modern philosophy. The concern it has for man, which it lays claim to not only in its discourse but in its pathos, the care with which it attempts to define him as a living being, an individual at work, or a speaking subject, herald the long-awaited return of a human reign only to the high-minded few; in fact, it concerns, rather more prosaically and less morally, an empirico-critical reduplication by means of which an attempt is made to make the man of nature, of exchange, or of discourse, serve as the foundation of his own finitude. In this Fold, the transcendental function is doubled over so that it covers with its dominating network the inert, grey space of empiricity; inversely, empirical contents are given life, gradually pull themselves upright, and are immediately subsumed in a discourse which carries their transcendental presumption into the distance. And so we find philosophy falling asleep once more in the hollow of this Fold; this time not the sleep of Dogmatism, but that of Anthropology. All empirical knowledge, provided it concerns man, can serve as a possible philosophical field in which the foundation of knowledge, the definition of its limits, and, in the end, the truth of all truth must be discoverable. The anthropological configuration of modern philosophy consists in doubling over dogmatism, in dividing it into two different levels each lending support to and limiting the other: the pre-critical analysis of what man is in his essence becomes the analytic of everything that can, in general, be presented to man’s experience. (OT 340/MC 351-2)

Without coincidence, Foucault titles Chapter 9, Section VIII of The Order of Things,

“The Anthropological Sleep,” which is a clear nod to Kant’s autobiographical statement

in Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics about his dogmatic slumber in speculative

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philosophy.25

As a first step, it is helpful to understand Kant’s descriptions of dogmatism. He

describes metaphysics as that “same old worm-eaten dogmatism” (CPR Ax) because it is

“the presumption of getting on solely with pure cognition from (philosophical) concepts

according to principles which reason has been using for a long time without first

inquiring in what way and by what right it has obtained them” (CPR Bxxxv; my

emphasis). What defines dogmatism, for Kant, is the unreflective presumption that

human beings are capable of acquiring knowledge of things as they are in themselves;

that is, it claims to know things that are beyond the scope of human understanding. This

presumption means that the dogmatist fails to engage in serious consideration of the

grounds on which metaphysical claims are made possible, and limited, by the conditions

of experience. The critical method, on the other hand, makes no such presumption

because it seeks to locate the “primary sources of our cognition” (CPR A758/B786) as a

means of avoiding such unfounded assumptions.

It would be a mistake to hastily conclude that Foucault is casually using

the notion of a dogmatic, pre-critical slumber. So let us examine this passage in more

detail.

By using these terms, Foucault appears to be claiming that the analytic of finitude

involves a similar unfounded presumption. If this claim has any merit, we ought to be

able to discover what it is. First, notice that anthropology is not just a simple dogmatism,

but rather the “doubling over [of] dogmatism,” which Foucault explains as the doubling

of the “transcendental function” and explains that this includes a “transcendental

25 Kant says, “I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy” (Kant, Prolegomena, 4:260).

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presumption”. Understanding the doubled over dogmatism of the analytic of finitude

therefore requires us to understand the relation between the doubling of the

transcendental function and the presumption involved. The key passage in this regard

appears at the close of the second paragraph of the block quote at the opening of the

section. Foucault says quite clearly that part of this dogmatism consists in “the precritical

analysis of what man is in his essence”. The reason that the analysis of the essence of

man is precritical is because it is quite simply a metaphysical investigation, assuming that

it is possible to arrive at knowledge of the human being as it is in itself. I shall expand on

this point below, but here we have one side of the dogmatic fold. Foucault proceeds to

say that this “essence becomes the analytic of everything that can, in general, be

presented to man’s experience.” The claim, then, is that the analysis of the human

essence, which is an effort that is precritical in nature, is paradoxically put to a

transcendental use to synthesize experience, since knowledge of essences is a violation of

transcendental conditions as limits of knowledge. The second dogmatic fold of the

analytic of finitude is the use of essential human features as transcendental elements.

Hence, philosophical anthropology is doubly dogmatic. It assumes metaphysical

knowledge of human nature and uses this assumption to attempt a transcendental

synthesis of experience.

Foucault attacks this doubled dogmatism from two angles. First, he challenges

the idea that the empirical sciences could provide anything more for philosophical

knowledge than mere generalizations about human beings, and that these generalizations

cannot therefore be understood as indicative of genuine transcendental syntheses.

Second, Foucault sees the very attempt to convert empirical claims into essential facts

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about human beings as a violation of the constraints imposed upon knowledge by the

transcendental (formal) conditions of experience.

In Section 2.2 we saw that Foucault mentions the rightfulness of life, labor, and

language as conditions of experience, but I never discussed his view on this issue. The

chief claim he makes is that the rightfulness of these purported transcendental conditions

is bound up with the claims of the empirical sciences. The suggestion he seems to be

making is that their rightfulness is at the very least partially and perhaps fully dependent

upon the empirical sciences of biology, economics, and language. If this is correct, then

it is an obvious problem that life, labor, and language are claimed as grounds of

experience and therefore grounds of those empirical sciences.26

26 Recall that Foucault says that the very empirical sciences that need foundations also supply the elements with which they are to be founded.

Now, I do not take it that

Foucault doubts the veracity of all empirical science, and rejects on philosophical

grounds the claims that organisms intend their own survival, that they work to satisfy

their desires, and desire to communicate their thoughts. So, if the rightfulness of life,

labor, and language as transcendental conditions depends on their being vindicated by

their correlative empirical sciences, then one cannot conclude that they are transcendental

conditions at all. More appropriately, they are the results of something like empirical

deductions and therefore cannot underwrite representations in the way that the analytic of

finitude purports. As was previously noted, Foucault describes them as empirical

syntheses, which means they are at most universal propositions but are not capable of

being necessary conditions of possible experience. Empirical facts about human beings

(which are converted into the quasi-transcendentals of life, labor, and language) might

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seem to possess such a transcendental status, but Foucault asserts that their dependence

on the empirical sciences puts this seeming into question, and admits of a blurring of the

transcendental and the empirical (OT 341/MC 352) – a distinction that Foucault says

Kant “demonstrated”. This confusion (whatever its source) of the empirical for the

transcendental seems to be precisely his point when he says that the analytic of finitude

results when “the relations of thought to formalization [i.e., transcendental analysis] are

not reflected upon correctly” (OT 348/MC 361). Thus, Foucault’s use of the term

‘transcendental’ for those empirical syntheses must be tongue-in-cheek.

It seems to me that that Foucault believes that there is simply too much

fluctuation and tensions internal to the empirical sciences themselves that vitiates the

notion that empirical sciences are capable of revealing any human structures at all let

alone those that possess essentiality. I suggest that this is the view he espouses in the last

chapter of The Order of Things, which is rarely discussed in the literature, where

Foucault describes the “counter-sciences,” such as psychoanalysis, ethnology, sociology,

and linguistics (OT 380/MC 391-2). By using the term ‘counter-sciences’ he:

does not mean that they are less ‘rational’ or ‘objective’ than the others, but that they flow in the opposite direction, that they lead them back to their epistemological basis, and that they ceaselessly ‘unmake’ that very man who is creating and recreating his positivity…. (OT 379/MC 391)

Foucault’s point is simple. The counter-sciences provide alternative explanations of the

empirical facts that challenge the idea that the will to survive, laboring for the satisfaction

of material needs, and the desire to communicate are sufficient to explain the

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phenomenon of human behavior.27

Foucault does not only complain that attempting to vindicate life, labor, and

language as transcendental conditions of experience through the empirical sciences is

fraught with difficulty, he also challenges their coherence as essential, rather than merely

empirical, human facts. In discussing Kant’s role in modernity, Foucault says “[o]pposite

this opening to the transcendental, and symmetrical to it” there emerges a new kind of

transcendental analysis. This analysis seeks the conditions of possible knowledge not in

the formal subject, which is Kant’s project, but rather “from the point of view of the

being itself that is represented,” that is, in the “object and its existence” (OT 244/MC

257). We have already seen what this kind of reflection amounts to: trying to establish

that the conditions of possible experience are to be found in facts about the human being

instead of the transcendental subject. Foucault continues, “[L]ike the Idea in the

transcendental Dialectic,” the empirical syntheses “totalize phenomena and express the a

priori coherence of empirical multiplicities” (Ibid.). It is important in the preceding that

life, labor, and language are described as analogous to ideas in the Transcendental

Dialectic. This statement bear a similarity to Foucault’s other statements about the

analytic of finitude as precritical and dogmatic. Add to the latter that they possess the

character of dialectical ideas in the Kantian sense, and we can begin to see why Foucault

is so hostile to explanations of the human essence as consisting in an organisms will to

In short, the counter-sciences challenge the purported

transcendental nature of life, labor, and language as necessary theoretical terms for the

empirical sciences of biology, economic, and philology.

27 For more on Foucault on the counter-sciences, see Gutting, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason, pp. 214-217, and Mahon, Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy, pp. 78-9.

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survive, and desires to satisfy his needs and communicate: to posses such knowledge

would require transgressing the bounds of possible experience. If there is doubt that this

interpretation is correct, Foucault himself confirms this claim when he says, “As soon as

one tries to define an essence of man which could articulate itself from itself and which at

the same time would be the foundation of all possible knowledge and of any possible

limit to knowledge, one swims in total paralogism” (DE1 No 31, 452). In other words,

Foucault is claiming that modern philosophical anthropology commits a formally

fallacious inference because it reasons to a conclusion only through equivocating on the

nature of a transcendental ground. So, there is good evidence that there is a Kantian

foundation to Foucault’s critique of the analytic of finitude. But let us hash this out.

To understand Foucault’s claims, we need to return to Kant. After articulating the

conditions of possible experience in the Transcendental Aesthetic and Analytic, Kant

wield his findings in the Transcendental Dialectic. The Analytic establishes that that

“formal aspect of all truth consists in agreement with the laws of the understanding”

(CPR A294/B350). Any claim about an object that is inconsistent with these laws, which

means any claim that seeks to know objects outside of the objective time-order of

sensible impressions, is neither true nor false. Such claims are neither true nor false

because they do not refer to any known existing object. Kant explains that such claims

are the result of the faculty of reason seeking “to bring the greatest manifold of cognition

of the understanding to the smallest number of principles (universal conditions), and

thereby to effect the highest unity of the manifold” (CPR A305/B361). This need of

reason forces it to use the categories to try and represent the given contents of experience

under a higher unity. But, Kant says, “the subjective necessity of a certain connection of

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our concepts” is mistakenly used for “the determination of things in themselves” (CPR

A297/B353). This mistake Kant describes as “transcendental illusion,” and the

Transcendental Dialectic is a “logic of illusion,” or an analysis of how and why such

illusions occur. He goes on to articulate three objects in particular that reason not only

mistakes to have a real existence, but demands that they do: the absolute unity of the

thinking subject, the absolute unity of empirical conditions (the world), and an

unconditioned cause or God. Previous philosophers have taken these ideas to correspond

to actually existing objects when, in fact, they are merely inferences of reason that

possess no objective validity or do not refer to actual objects of experience. While Kant

argues that they must be thought, insofar as reason demands it, they cannot be known to

actually exist, since that would require knowledge of things outside of the limits of the

subjective conditions of experience.

The paralogisms of pure reason are claims of knowledge about the nature of this

absolute unity of this thinking subject. Where a logical paralogism is simply a formally

invalid syllogism, a transcendental paralogism is invalid because it “has a transcendental

ground for inferring falsely due to its form” (CPR A341/B399). The transcendental

ground to which Kant refers is “the universal proposition ‘I think’” or “the logical unity

of every thought” (CPR A398). The “rational psychologist” confuses the ‘I think’ for the

human soul and then infers from the necessity of the ‘I think’ to the souls metaphysical

features. Kant notes four such inferences: that the soul is a substance, it is simple, it is a

numerically identical personality, and that it can exist independently of the body. The

problem in all of these inferences is that of “taking the unity of the synthesis of thoughts

[mistakenly] for a perceived unity in the subject of these thoughts” (CPR A402). In other

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words, the subject of thought is merely a formal unity that provides the conditions of

possible experience, but the rational psychologist takes it to refer to a real soul and

articulates its metaphysical features.

We are now in a position to see why Foucault says that the analytic of finitude,

man, and modern philosophical anthropology swims in paralogism. In the Commentary,

Foucault refers to man as being founded on an “anthropological illusion,” which he

claims is “the reverse, the mirror image of the transcendental illusion” (IKA 122; my

emphasis), and goes on to describe this illusion as a substantializing, thickening and

essentializing of the ‘I think’ (IKA 121-3). If the problem of the paralogisms is that of

mistakenly rendering the ‘I think’ into an object with metaphysical attributes capable of

being grasped through pure reflection, the “reverse” or “mirror image” of this illusion

would be to mistakenly render the ‘I think’ into an object with essential attributes capable

of being grasped through empirical reflection. In the case of the latter, the mistake

appears to be that not only is knowledge of an essence a hypostatization of the ‘I think,’

transcendental features do not reveal themselves in empirical reflection. Unlike the

precritical metaphysics of the rational psychologist, the modern metaphysician of human

nature infers from the claims of the empirical sciences back to the essential facts about

human beings that give those sciences their coherence. The philosophical anthropologist

scours the empirical sciences for the features of the human essence that would explain

our activities, only to ultimately inject them back into the sciences as their foundation,

creating what Foucault calls an “anthropological circle” (IKA 123). The modern

philosophical anthropologist tries to navigate between the metaphysics of human nature

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and empirical science, explaining the possibility of the latter in terms of the former, but,

as we have seen, also using the latter to justify the former.

While Foucault’s criticisms of the analytic of finitude might be merited, I would

like to return briefly to the issue of Kant’s role in it. There is undoubtedly some hostility

toward Kant, which is evident in those statements where Foucault addresses Kant’s

interest in the question of man. The problem cannot be that Kant undertakes the

empirical analysis of human beings, but rather that, in Foucault’s opinion, Kant tends at

times toward using empirical insights to describe the human essence. But it is important

to be cautious here about Kant’s considered opinion of human nature. And there is

reason to think that Foucault is cautious in this regard, insofar as he describes Kant as

being merely haunted by the question of man or constantly at the peril of undertaking a

philosophical anthropology; that is, anthropology is a danger for Kant’s philosophy but

not a conceptual necessity. This cautiousness is justified because perhaps more than

anyone before him, Kant makes the study of human nature a second class affair. Allen

Wood points out that one of Kant’s claims about the human being is that we cannot say

whether we possess a human nature because the empirical analysis of human beings

cannot purport to know human nature all, for that would constitute metaphysical

knowledge of the human essence.28

Although he places the question “What is the human being?” at the very foundation of philosophy, Kant also thinks it is impossible to define what is peculiar to the human species. For, he says, this species is only one possible variant of rational nature, yet we are acquainted with no other variants with which to compare it and arrive at specific differentia […]. Whatever we say about

So, Wood says:

28 Wood, “Kant and the Problem of Human Nature,” p. 50.

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human nature, its predispositions and its propensities, can have only a provisional character.29

This provisional character, as Kant makes clear in his Anthropology, is, paradoxically,

partly due to human nature itself, which tends toward its own dissemblance. This is due

to the human beings immersion in habits and adherence to contingent rules of time and

place. Kant claims that these habits and circumstances act as a “second nature” that

shrouds our ability to know essential facts about human beings (APP 7:121). Manfred

Kuehn summarizes Kant’s point well, “We can observe neither ourselves as we ‘really’

are nor others as they ‘really’ are because the very act of observing changes the behavior

that is observed. Dissimulation and habit interfere. So it is difficult to grasp what human

nature actually is…”30

Perhaps Foucault is correct that there is something slightly strange about

modernity, in that there is no possibility of coming into knowledge of human nature and

yet modernity incessantly seeks to know this nature, perhaps above all other

philosophical interests. Regardless, whether modernity manifests this paradoxical

interest, it is only due to Kant’s insights that Foucault can complain about Kant’s interest

in human nature to begin with. And, if my argument is correct – if Foucault does

separate out the Kantian subject from the confusions at the heart of the analytic of

finitude, and also uses Kant’s doctrine of the subject to isolate and criticize those

confusions – then that is precisely what Foucault does. In any case, Foucault scholarship

If Foucault is a critic of those who claim to possess knowledge of

human nature, it seems difficult to imagine that he does not see Kant as a friend rather

than foe in this regard.

29 Wood, “Kant and the Problem of Human Nature,” p. 47. 30 Manfred Kuehn, “Introduction,” in APP, p. xiii.

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is mistaken about Foucault’s stance on the transcendental subject; he is far more

sympathetic to it than previously realized. It must be recognized, however, that for

Foucault the transcendental subject is merely a formal condition of experience, and that

when he speaks of man, the analytic of finitude, and philosophical anthropology, and

subjectivity more broadly, he is speaking about the philosophical inquiry into the human

essence from the angle of empirical science.

2.6 Foucault’s Kantian Skepticism about Human Nature

In his recent book on the similarities and contrasts of the philosophies of Jean-

Paul Sartre and Foucault, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Thomas Flynn argues

that Foucault is a “historical nominalist,” by which Flynn means that Foucault adopts a

“methodological individualism.”31 According to this view, universals or collections are,

“for purposes of explanation,” reducible “to the individuals that comprise them.”32

31 Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, p. 32.

In

Foucault’s words, this is what he refers to as a “nominalist reduction” (EW1 200/DE4 No

340, 580). Foucault’s historical ontology engages in a methodological bracketing of

universals in order to not assume that any of the objects that enter into his inquiries

perdure. The importance of this bracketing is especially relevant to his historical

ontology since the object of this ontology is ourselves. For this reason, Foucault explains

that his nominalism is “a systematic skepticism toward all anthropological universals”

(EW2 461/DE4 No 345, 634). “In regard to human nature or the categories that may be

applied to the subject,” Foucault continues, “everything in our knowledge which is

suggested to us as being universally valid must be tested and analyzed” (EW2 461/DE4

32 Ibid.

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No 345, 634). The purpose of performing such a reduction is to put into question the

categories we apply to ourselves in order to determine if there is a plausible historical

explanation for the genesis of these categories that does not assume their universality and

necessity. And the motivating factor involved in arriving at such explanations is critical

in nature, meaning it is aimed at shaking us free of the self-evidence of these categories

and forcing us to consider ourselves in ways previously unrecognized.33

One must be careful here to not interpret this reduction of our self-categorizations

as anything more than a methodological maneuver motivated by Foucault’s critical focus.

“Epistemically and ontologically,” Flynn says, “Foucault’s nominalism […] is a form of

social constructivism. Social reality and the individuals that inhabit it are not there to be

found ‘in themselves’ but are the product of systematic relationships and chance

events.”34 This characterization is fairly accurate, but it is easy to slide into a view in

which Foucault is understood as endorsing a wholesale social constructivism, which

would mean that Foucault adopts a metaphysical or ontological nominalism. Flynn

suggests that Foucault’s mature philosophical position is not, as Ian Hacking

characterizes it, the propounding of “an extreme nominalism: nothing, not even the ways

I can describe myself, is either this or that but history made it so.”35 Michael Kelly, for

example, asserts that at the heart of the disagreement between Foucault and Habermas is

that the former rejects universals while the latter does not.36

33 See Chapter One, Section 1.5.

Or, “Foucault rejects what

he calls ‘anthropological universals,’ that is, truth claims about man or human nature that

34 Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, p. 44. 35 Hacking, Historical Ontology, p. 83. 36 Kelly, “Foucault, Habermas, and the Self-Referentiality of Critique”.

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are ahistorical or claim universality.”37 Finally, “What Foucault describes with different

inflections in all his works are important moments and elements of that history. It is a

history that is at once constitutive and contingent: it makes us who we are, but not by

necessity.”38 There is, in other words, the real danger in misconstruing Foucault’s mature

position and the one that is the most textually sensitive. While in his earlier works

Foucault undoubtedly thinks that the subject (qua self) is historically constituted, and that

knowledge of human nature is problematic for the constraints on conduct that it allows,39

Allow me to cite in full a passage from which I have lifted a few sentences.

Foucault says:

we should see his thesis about the historical constitution of the subject as a critical

skeptical account of the ways in which we claim to know ourselves as we are in

ourselves. So, I want to insist that, given my arguments in the previous chapter and the

Kantian tenor of Foucault’s critique of the analytic of finitude, the most appropriate

rendering of Foucault’s position is essentially skeptical. Fortunately, there is evidence of

this view.

Taking the question of relations between the subject and truth as the guiding thread for all these analyses implies certain choices of method. And, first, a systematic skepticism toward all anthropological universals – which does not mean rejecting them all from the start, outright and once and for all, but that nothing of that order must be accepted that is not strictly indispensable . In regard to human nature or the categories that may be applied to the subject, everything in our knowledge which is suggested to us as being universally valid must be tested and analyzed. (EW2 461/DE4 No 345, 634)

37 McLaren, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity, p. 21. 38 May, The Philosophy of Foucault, p. 123. 39 See Chapter One, Section 1.2.4.

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It is clear from these statements that Foucault’s description of his methodological

nominalism is meant to convey that all alleged universals are to be tested and not rejected

“from the start, outright and once and for all”. The very language of testing implies that

some anthropological facts might withstand such testing, while others might not.

Foucault is clear, though, that no universals are to be accepted that are not

“indispensable”.

This notion of testing is a fortunate fit for the interpretation of critical ontology I

provided in provided in Chapter One. Critical ontology, by virtue of investigating who

we are, is a testing of our self-conceptions and identities for the purpose of discerning

which of those conceptions and identities might be imposed arbitrarily and therefore

constitute a limit on our freedom. Foucault does not possess legitimate criteria for

deciding which conception and identity must be dispensed with, but the point here is that

this view toward anthropological universals or essential human features fits quite cleanly

with the view I sketched in Chapter One.

Now, there is one more matter to clear up before closing this chapter. I have

argued, on the one hand, that Foucault is a skeptic about anthropological universals. I

have also argued, however, that his methodology is such that he performs a

methodological reduction of anthropological universals in order to test whether those

universals are genuine. It would appear, then, that I am arguing it is Foucault’s view that

anthropological universals cannot be known, since to know such universals would violate

the limits of knowledge, and yet the critical task is to expose the historical sources of

these universals. Why, one might wonder, do the latter if the former is true? Put

differently, if we cannot know the universals that constitute our identities, why then make

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the effort of analyzing those universals in order to disclose their historical sources? It

would seem that my interpretation of Foucault as skeptical about the possibility of

arriving at knowledge of human nature deprives his critical project of its edge.

It seems to me that these views are actually complementary. In the first case, the

Kantian view I have attributed to Foucault does not hold that the anthropological

universals that constitute the categories of ourselves are non-existent. Rather, this view

holds that those universals are principle unknowable. For example, on this view we

would be incapable of knowing the essential difference or differences between the sexes.

This is not to say, however, that to the best of our knowledge we have not located

essential differences. It might turn out that some anthropological universals are, as

Foucault says, “strictly indispensable”. Where Foucault’s critical project makes contact

with the philosophical critique of knowledge of anthropological universals is that his

critique is oriented toward keeping in check or restraining our desire to know ourselves as

we really are, and allowing only nothing but the most strictly indispensable or justified

universals stand as approximations of the kinds of beings we might really be.

Furthermore, Foucault understands that it is a mistake to see any purported essential facts

about human beings as possessing a transcendental character. That is, they cannot be

made into conditions of possible knowledge since essential facts cannot be known

because they are not in conformity with the formal conditions of experience. Of course,

for Foucault those are perhaps the ones we might focus our critical attention on the most.

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For, as he warns us, it is that which appears most rational that allows greater access into

how we conduct ourselves.40

40 See Chapter One, Sections 1.2.4 and 1.5.1.

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CHAPTER THREE

HISTORICAL ONTOLOGY AS HISTORICAL ANALYTICS

3.1 Introduction

Colin Koopman has recently taken the offensive against what he sees as an

entrenched and pervasive misunderstanding of Foucault’s historical methodology. Some

recent secondary literature on this topic attempts to read Foucault in light of his perceived

connections to the tradition of transcendental phenomenology. These connections are

perceived with regard to Foucault’s archaeological method, which he claims is the most

basic of his historical methods.1

1 See 3.2 below for straightforward evidence of the claim that archaeology is the more basic of his two methodologies, archaeology and genealogy. For more on the latter, see Chapter One, 1.5.3, and Mahon, Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy.

While for some time comparisons have been made

between archaeology and phenomenological description, an emerging line of

interpretation defends the proposition that archaeology is phenomenological description.

According to Kevin Thompson, the phenomenological nature of archaeology is directly

traceable to Foucault’s claimed philosophical lineage, which begins with Jean Cavaillès

confrontation with Husserlian phenomenology. According to Cavaillès, Thompson

claims, an accurate phenomenology must avoid explanatory recourse to the

transcendental subject and account for the coextension of transcendental consciousness

and historical consciousness. Thompson sees Foucaultian archaeology as providing this

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account, as evidenced by Foucault’s strange concept of the “historical a priori,” formally

described in The Archaeology of Knowledge (hereafter, Archaeology), which isolates a

transcendental field that accounts for the possibility of experience but without the

“transcendental narcissism” of the subject. Thompson proceeds to claim that archaeology

is therefore best understood as a form of “eidetic description” that moves regressively

from the given to the historically specific essences contained in the given and which are

transformed as those structures are deployed in experience. Consequently, Foucault

decisively responds to Cavaillès challenge to phenomenology by transforming

phenomenology into an historical account of transformable essences.

Koopman criticizes phenomenological interpretations of Foucault’s historical

methodologies, particularly Thompson’s account, on several points. He finds it difficult

to square Thompson’s interpretation with Foucault’s resistance to transcendental

phenomenology in general, and also argues that the historical methodology Thompson

attributes to Foucault is ultimately untenable because it precludes itself from accounting

for the possibility of change. These are important objections, but the real failure of

Thompson’s phenomenological interpretation, Koopman alleges, is that it seems

fundamentally at odds with Foucault’s mature philosophy. Foucault is clear in the end

that his critical project is not transcendental. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of

“problematization,” Koopman argues that Thompson, and the phenomenological

interpretation in general, misinterprets Foucault’s focus on critical conditions of the

present for transcendental conditions of experience. The former are mere historically

contingent practices and events that create the present situation, and it is a mistake to see

these critical conditions as being historical and yet obtaining with the universality and

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necessity of transcendental conditions, as Foucault’s concept of the historical a priori

implies. Koopman therefore concludes that the best interpretation of Foucault’s

methodologies will cohere with the latter’s later views, which are decidedly more

oriented toward descriptions of the historical processes, or the practices and events, that

shape the present.

I think Koopman’s criticisms of Thompson’s phenomenological interpretation are

on target on each point. These criticisms are in accordance with the interpretation of

Foucault’s philosophy developed in the previous two chapters. Chapter One established

that transcendental philosophy, as an analytics of truth, is not an ultimately object of

disapproval for Foucault, and Chapter Two firmly established that Kant’s formal,

transcendental account of experience is outside of the scope of his criticism of modern

philosophical anthropology. It is wrong, I believe, to see Foucault as trying to either

supplant or undermine transcendental criticism. His preferred object of attack is the

subject conceived as the self, which he cashes out as “anthropological universals” and

equates to purported essential facts about human beings. Thus, it is natural that my own

views would fall into line with Koopman’s criticisms of the phenomenological

interpretation, and in explicating those criticisms I will provide additional support that the

phenomenological interpretation cannot accommodate Foucault’s mature philosophy.

This is not to say, however, that Koopman’s preferred interpretation is correct on

the details. In the first case, his argument for the inaccuracy of the phenomenological

interpretation and his account of Foucaultian critique lacks textual basis, which is an

interpretative shortcoming that is immensely magnified by his failure to account for the

transcendental language that appears in Foucault’s writings. It turns out, ironically, that

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while Thompson’s view is decidedly not copasetic with Foucault’s mature philosophy, it

is Thompson, and not Koopman, who does better justice to Foucault’s terminology and

pregnant statements, as the allusions to transcendental philosophy can be handled by

interpreting them within the purview of transcendental phenomenology. This fact casts

doubt on Koopman’s insistence that Foucault ultimately abandoned the project

undertaken in Archaeology (but not archaeology in general). In the end, he does not

adequately account for the transcendental tenor of Foucault’s writings. This raises a

question. If Foucault is so adamant to distance himself from transcendental criticism,2 as

Koopman asserts, why does he constantly use language that suggests he is working

within that tradition? When Thompson pushes this point Koopman admits, “I doubt that

either Thompson or myself could ever definitively show that our interpretation is the only

one that the relevant texts withstand.”3

My task in this chapter of the dissertation is to provide an account of the

conceptual architecture of Foucault’s philosophy that defends the kind of view Koopman

pushes while providing a more forceful response to Thompson’s phenomenological

interpretation. Thompson’s mistake, I will argue, is to render Foucaultian archaeology

too narrowly as essentially phenomenological when it is more plausibly understood, I

argue, as possessing sources in Kant’s Transcendental Analytic. To be clear, I am not

claiming that there are no interesting ways in which Foucault’s thought might be clarified

or better understood in certain respects by comparing it to phenomenological inquiry, or

2 For example, in 1972 he says, “In all of my work I strive […] to avoid any reference to this transcendental as a condition of possibility for any knowledge” (FL 98/DE2 No 109, 373). When Foucault says “this transcendental” he is referring specifically to Kantian and Husserlian conceptions of the transcendental. In Section 3.2.3 I will point to a more convincing example in “What is Enlightenment?” 3 Koopman, “Response to Thompson’s Response,” p. 130.

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that Foucault might incorporate aspects of the method of phenomenological description

into his own methods. Defending that claim would require a complete investigation of

Foucault’s dealings with phenomenology, which is a dissertation in itself. Rather, I

contest Thompson’s assertion that his phenomenological interpretation is sufficient for

capturing the conceptual architecture at the heart of Foucault’s thought. Koopman’s

mistake is to underplay the extent to which Foucault’s historical critique carries the

conceptual architecture of transcendental philosophy. Foucault’s critical ontology is,

after all, an ontology, where ontology is meant as an analytic of experience – as

providing the forms of experience – and as an ontology of ourselves, this analytic

concerns the forms of experience of ourselves. For Kant, an analytic spells out the rule of

truth for judgments and possible experience, investigates the universal and necessary

forms of experience, and makes the essential structure of objects none other than the

forms of thought (i.e., the categories). Ontology is, for Kant, inquiry into those forms.

Foucault, on the other hand, is not concerned with the necessary conditions of possible

experience, but the critical or historical conditions of our experience of ourselves – our

subjectivity, or how we become tied to a self-knowledge through forms of experience of

ourselves – where those forms or conditions are socially imposed rules of acceptability

for evaluating discursive and non-discursive acts and which constitute human beings as

objects of their own experience. Foucault does, in the end, offer an account of how our

experience of ourselves is constituted, and therefore how subjects are constituted, but it is

not intended to replace Kant’s transcendental account.

Thus, my principal claim in this chapter is that the historical ontology that

comprises critical ontology must be understood as an ontology in the way Kant

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understands ontology in the wake of his Transcendental Analytic in the first Critique,

namely, as an analysis of the forms immanent to our thinking about ‘things’ that

‘constitute’ them as objects of experience. For Foucault, I will argue, the scope of these

‘things’ is restricted by the object of his ontology – ourselves – and he is ultimately trying

to account for how the rules according to which we conduct ourselves and which

contribute to constituting and limiting the experience of ourselves. My argument relies

on a number of textual clues throughout his writings, and I focus especially on his

concepts of “archaeology,” “historical ontology,” “forms of experience,” “historical a

priori,” and “games of truth,” showing that when taken collectively we can see the

Kantian roots of these concepts while not reducing them to Kant’s philosophy.


The first task of this chapter is to develop the debate between Thompson and

Koopman, which is the content of Section 3.2, and to indicate the weaknesses of both

views. I then turn, in Section 3.3, to a somewhat offhand remark by Foucault in response

to the 1970 English translation of The Order of Things (originally published in 1966) in

which he suggests that his concept of archaeology originates in Kant’s philosophy. I use

this remark to spell out more problems for Thompson’s interpretation, notably his

inappropriate anachronistic interpretation of Foucaultian archaeology. Using the

correlation between Kant and Foucault on archaeology as a clue, I briefly sketch Kant’s

account of the “form of experience” in Section 3.4, concentrating on the notions in Kant’s

Transcendental Analytic and representation of ontology that are important for

understanding how Foucault models the methodology of his critical ontology – his

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“historical ontology” – on Kantian transcendental critique. The task of Section 3.5 is to

articulate the nature and structure of archaeology as historical ontology while accounting

for its Kantian elements.

3.2 The Current Debate about Foucault’s Methodology

In “What is Enlightenment?”, Foucault says that critical ontology is “genealogical

in its design and archaeological in its method” (EW1 315/DE4 No 339, 574). To say that

critical ontology is archaeological in method means that it “treats the instances of

discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do” (Ibid.), and it is genealogical in

design because “it will separate out […] the possibility of no longer being, doing, or

thinking what we are, do, or think” (EW1 315-6/Ibid.). In his 1983 Berkeley lecture,

“The Culture of the Self,”4 he confirms the importance of archaeology for his historical

inquiries, “Genealogy defines the target and finality of the work and archaeology

indicates the field in which I deal in order to make a genealogy.”5 These comments make

it apparent that while Foucault conceives genealogy as necessary for critical purposes,6

3.2.1 Thompson’s Phenomenological Interpretation of Archaeology

it

is not also sufficient, for a genealogy is not possible without the antecedent work of

archaeology. The disagreement between Thompson and Koopman concerns just how to

interpret this absolutely crucial aspect of Foucault’s critical methodology.

Phenomenological interpretations of Foucault’s philosophy are some of the oldest,

prominent, and most accepted. In their classic 1983 text, Hubert Dreyfus and Paul 4 Freely available at: http://dpg.lib.berkeley.edu/webdb/mrc/search_vod.pl?avr=1. 5 Quoted from Mahon, Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy, p. 212; see also p. 105. 6 See Chapter One, Section 1.5.3.

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Rabinow call Foucault’s archaeological method “a phenomenology to end all

phenomenology”.7 Although not admitting an explicitly phenomenological reading,

Leonard Lawlor interprets Foucaultian archaeology against the background of Edmund

Husserl and Eugene Fink, and claims that Foucault is “differentiating himself from

Merleau-Ponty,” which suggests that their common root is phenomenology.8 Johanna

Oksala targets overly empiricist and Nietzschean readings of Foucault’s philosophy,

claiming that his thinking is far more informed by phenomenology than Nietzschean

interpreters claim.9 While accounts such as these show potential and sometimes

interesting commonalities between phenomenology and archaeology, they tend to focus

more on commonalities than arguing that archaeology is a species of phenomenological

description. Kevin Thompson has argued for precisely this point. In his “History and

Transcendentality: Foucault, Cavaillès, and the Phenomenology of the Concept,”

Thompson argues that Foucault attempts to meld the transcendental and the empirical

together to produce a conception of a historical transcendental field without the

constitutive acts of the subject.10

7 Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, Ch. 3.

Thompson contends that this project directly descends

from Foucault’s phenomenological heritage, notably the thought of Jean Cavaillès, and

fundamentally shapes his philosophical thinking.

8 Lawlor, Thinking Through French Philosophy, Ch. 2. 9 Oksala, Foucault on Freedom, pp. 4-9. 10 Han offers the similar view that Foucault is attempting to unite the transcendental and the historical (Han, Foucault’s Critical Project). However, her argument is not necessarily that Foucault is a phenomenologist. Along with Han and Thompson one could include Keith Robinson’s interpretation of Foucault as offering an “immanent transcendental”. However, Robinson bypasses the phenomenological reading and argues that this conception is capable of being teased out in Kant’s philosophy. Robinson’s interpretation is far more philosophical than textual, but unsatisfactory because ultimately he fails to capture the fact, which is so very clear in “What is Enlightenment?”, that Foucault says in no uncertain terms that his project is not transcendental. See Keith Robinson, “An Immanent Transcendental”.

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For Thompson, the clue to this interpretation lies in Foucault’s introduction to the

1978 English translation of Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological, in

addition to the lecture of the same year, “What is Critique?” In these essays Foucault

presents a brief historical narrative of the emergence of phenomenology in France,

making a subtle but, according Thompson, crucial distinction between two schools of

phenomenology.11 First, however, Thompson motivates his reading by noting the

strangeness of Foucault’s central archaeological concept of the “historical a priori”. This

concept appears in several places in The Order of Things,12 the short but pivotal chapter

“The Historical a priori and the Archive” in Archaeology, and, surprisingly, Foucault’s

posthumously published pseudonymous essay, “Foucault”.13

an inquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible; in what space of order knowledge was constituted; on the basis of what historical a priori, and in the element of what positivity, ideas could appear, sciences be established, experience reflected in philosophies, rationalities be formed, only, perhaps, to dissolve and vanish soon afterwards. […] Such an enterprise is not so much a history, in the traditional meaning of the word, as an ‘archaeology’. (OT xxii/MC 13)

For example, in the Preface

to the former text, Foucault describes his project as:

By methodologically isolating the historical a priori for a given period of thought,

Foucault articulates the “positive unconscious” that eludes the consciousness of those in

that period and yet nevertheless manifests itself in their discourse. So, this a priori is

11 See the Introduction by Foucault in Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, pp. 7-24. My citations of the English translation of this introduction are to the revised version that appeared in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale 90.1 (1985): 3-14, and which is published in EW2. 12 See also OT 157/MC 171, 274/287, 318/329, 344/355, 378/390. 13 EW2 460/DE4 No 345, 632. By the time that Foucault discusses the historical a priori in this later essay he has already introduced the changes to his conception of rules, which are specified in Sections 3.3 and 3.5.2. In this essay I understand him to be using this concept to suggest, rather loosely, a linearity in his thinking.

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historical because it obtains for a particular period of time, and yet it is a priori because

at that time it is a condition of possibility for thought. The juxtaposition of “historical”

and “a priori” is, as Thompson notes, seemingly contradictory. That which is historical

is singular in scope and contingent in modality, while that which is a priori is universal in

scope and necessary in modality. But despite the counterintuitive nature of this concept,

Thompson claims that Foucault scholars:

assume a conventional understanding of the a priori as a dimension devoid of the capacity to change, and they thereby fail to recognize the truly innovative conception of the a priori that Foucault was able to develop by employing the methodological resources born in the tradition of the phenomenology of the concept.14

According to Thompson, the philosophical question that Foucault attempts to resolve in

his archaeological method is, “How is something to be at once transcendental and

historical and how is it to be grasped as such?”15

Returning to the essays of Foucault noted above, he asserts a fundamental

division that runs through French philosophy in the post-war era. This division, Foucault

says, is “rooted in phenomenology”. What he is referring to is what he understands as the

polarizing effect of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology in France. On the

one hand, Foucault explains that many philosophers, like Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice

Merleau-Ponty, took the path of Husserl himself in developing “a philosophy of

experience, of meaning, of the subject,” while others branched off from Husserl’s own

And the key to understanding how

Foucault resolves this tension, Thompson claims, is to be found in his phenomenological

heritage.

14 Thompson, “Historicity and Transcendentality,” p. 5. He glosses the views of Deleuze, Foucault; Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault; Han, Foucault’s Critical Project 15 Thompson, “Historicity and Transcendentality,” p. 2.

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path toward a “philosophy of knowledge, of rationality, and of the concept” (EW2

466/DE4 No 361, 764). According to Thompson, the former sought to extend and deepen

the Husserlian phenomenology of the subject, while the latter pursued “the problems of

formalism and intuitionalism” first broached in the work of Jean Cavaillès. In this

regard, Foucault sees Cavaillès as a undertaking a philosophy “deeply heterogeneous” to

the philosophy of the subject, which is a philosophical study also adopted by Alexandre

Koyré, Gaston Bachelard, and Georges Canguilhem, each of whom worked in the history

and philosophy of science in France. It was their localized and specific studies on

scientific concepts, Foucault notes, that “functioned as hotbeds of philosophical

elaboration insofar as they focused on the different facets of this question of Aufklärung,

essential to contemporary philosophy” (EW2 469/ DE4 No 361, 767). The focus on

scientific concepts and rationality forced the question of the self-evidence of those

concepts and scientific reasoning in general.16

The treatise of Cavaillès’ that Thompson believes is particularly important is Sur

la logique et la théorie de la science.

Given that Foucault aligns himself with

this latter side of the French philosophical tradition, Thompson believes it is necessary

for the scholarship to investigate the roots of Foucault’s philosophical tradition in

Cavaillès’ departure from Husserlian phenomenology. He thinks that in doing so we will

find the clue to unraveling Foucault’s contradictory concept of the historical a priori.

17

16 As we saw in Chapter One, Section 1.5.1, Foucault is concerned with precisely this question in his lecture “What is Critique?” Not coincidentally, this essay on Canguilhem and “What is Critique?” were both writing in 1978.

He explains that in this essay Cavaillès sets out to

17 Cavaillès, Sur la logique et la théorie de la science (translated as, “On Logic and the Theory of Science,” in Kockelmans and Kisiel, Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences). I will be assuming that Thompson’s reconstruction of Cavaillès’ essay, and his assessment of Husserl, is accurate.

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provide a sketch of a complete scientific theory, which for the latter means accounting for

the historical progress of the sciences as the continual deepening of scientific knowledge.

Cavaillès rejects then present-day neo-Kantian and logical positivist alternatives as

inadequate, so he considers Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological logic as a

candidate. The purpose of logic, on Thompson’s view of Husserl, is to lay down the

framework for validating scientific claims, which it does by disclosing and clarifying the

standards of evidence and intuitive fulfillment for inference, explanation, and truth, the

latter of which govern the construction of theories and the justification of propositions.

According to Cavaillès, Husserl believes that this logic is effectively a cultural

achievement, and the phenomenologists’ task is to trace the development of logic as

cultural achievements. For Cavaillès, however, this makes scientific logic dependent

upon contingent cultural developments rather than making scientific culture dependent on

the necessity of scientific logic, which means that Husserl fails to explain the necessity of

scientific progress. A phenomenological history, according to Cavaillès uncovers the

mere sedimentation of the moments of scientific realization but it does not explain the

necessity of scientific progress.18 Cavaillès (following Eugene Fink) therefore calls a

phenomenological history an ‘archaeology,’ but it is an archaeology that cannot

synthesize these sedimentations of scientific realizations of truth into an account of the

necessity of scientific progress.19

18 It is unclear to me in Thompson’s essay why the Husserlian accounts of evidence and truth itself is problematic.

19 Thompson, “Historicity and Transcendentality,” p. 9.

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Cavaillès’ solution is not entirely clear, as Thompson admits, for it appears in just

the final paragraph of the essay and is a “cryptic sketch” of a theory.20

[Cavaillès] argues that since the eruptive movement of historical mutation is endemic to the very nature of scientific knowledge, it must also be inherent in the transcendental field that grounds such knowledge, for otherwise this stratum would not be the foundation for a form of knowing that develops in this way. It follows from this that the transcendental must itself be alterable, changeable, and historical for it to be the condition for the possibility of scientific inquiry.

Husserl’s error

seems to be that he separates the transcendental theory of consciousness from formal

logic as it unfolds in scientific knowledge. In fact, as Thompson explains, transcendental

consciousness for Cavaillès just is the logic that unfolds in scientific knowledge. The

transcendental laws that govern subjective thought are subject to the same breaks and

upheavals that occur in scientific knowledge. But rather than grounding this logic in

cultural achievements, Cavaillès believes it is a dialectical process of the explication of

scientific concepts, which, as they are deepened in scientific inquiry, become the laws of

transcendental consciousness. Thus, science and transcendental philosophy become

unified, and as science unfolds historically, so does transcendental phenomenology.

Thompson summarizes:

21

This is what Cavaillès calls a “philosophy of the concept,” or, given the birth of this kind

of philosophy in response to Husserl’s phenomenology, what Thompson calls a

“phenomenology of the concept”.22


As a phenomenology of the concept rather than a

21 Ibid., p. 11. 22 Ibid. It is significant that Cavaillès himself, at least on Thompson’s rendering, never actually does use the language of transcendental phenomenology to describe his own project. See Sections 3.2.3 and 3.3 below for elucidation.

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phenomenology of consciousness, Thompson says it is Cavaillès who opens, but without

adequately explaining, the possibility of a truly historical transcendental field.23

Thompson reasons that if Cavaillès sets the basic problem of the phenomenology

of the concept, which Foucault traces as the roots of his own philosophical heritage, then

it stands to reason that there is a discernable sense in which Foucault is working within

the confines of the same problem. Adopting the terms ‘archaeology’ and ‘historical a

priori’ from Husserl,

24 Foucault, Thompson claims, tries to unify the transcendental and

the historical by drawing on the work of one of his mentors, Canguilhem. In The Order

of Discourse Foucault says that “a proposition must fulfill some onerous and complex

conditions before it can be admitted within a discourse; before it can be pronounced true

or false it must be, as Monsieur Canguilhem might say, ‘within the true’” (OD 224/35-6).

The distinction isolates the sense in which prior to a statement being accepted as true it

must meet some threshold conditions of “acceptability” (WC 61). Foucault provides the

example of the 19th century botanist Gregor Mendel, whose views were not accepted until

the turn of the 20th century and which are now considered factual. “Mendel spoke the

truth,” Foucault says, “but he was not dans le vrai (within the true) of contemporary

biological discourse” (OD 224/37). There are, in short, rules that are imposed upon

statements by the members of a particular discursive practice, and a statement must either

force change in those rules to be accepted as true or else simply meet them.25


24 See Husserl, “Appendix VI: [The Origin of Geometry],” The Crisis of European Sciences , p. 371. 25 I discuss Foucault’s notion of acceptability in Sections 3.3 and 3.5.2.

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Thompson sees Foucault as using the resources of the tradition of the

“phenomenology of the concept,” particularly the noted contribution of Canguilhem, to

work out Cavaillès’ cryptic response to Husserl.26

Thompson offers his gloss on the historical a priori:

According to Thompson, Foucault

recasts Canguilhem’s conditions of acceptability as the historical conditions of discourse,

which are the rules immanent to discursive practices that govern what kinds of statements

are candidates for being true. In Archaeology, Foucault refers to these historical

conditions as the “historical a priori,” which is the set of rules that characterize

discursive practices, “does not elude historicity,” and it is “not imposed from the

outside”. Rather, the rules that comprise the historical a priori are “transformable”

because they “are caught up in the very things that they connect” (AK 127/AS 168).

These rules are necessarily, at once, a priori and historical. They are a priori because they set down the conditions for being in the true. […] These rules are normative and, as such, bear prescriptive efficacy. But they do so not in the sense of absolute standards whose binding force derives from their being principles under which one can freely act, nor do they possess some form of physical causal determinacy. Rather, these rules function at the level of the categorial. Archaeological research carries out a form of transcendental deduction: it establishes the legitimacy of the rules of discursive formation by showing, through a form of imaginative variation, that, within a specified historical epoch, a statement can enter the domain of acceptability only insofar as it accords with these conditions not just as a matter of factual happenstance (quid facti), but by right (quid juris). Just as in all transcendental approaches, archaeology takes the

26 Curiously, Thompson does not connect Canguilhem to Cavaillès. On the story Thompson tells, Foucault tries to tackle the problem of combining the transcendental and historical that Cavaillès suggests, and uses Canguilhem as a resource. But Thompson does not provide any account of whether Canguilhem himself was interested in this problem. There is therefore a gap in Thompson’s narrative, since Foucault is supposed to belong to the tradition of the “phenomenology of the concept,” which is fundamentally oriented, on Thompson’s reading, by Cavaillès’ problem, despite the fact that there is no mention of this problem in Canguilhem’s thought. It is precisely the effort to fuse historicity and transcendentality, however, that defines the phenomenology of the concept, at least as Thompson describes it. This does not undermine the fact that Foucault might have tried to address Cavaillès’ problem, but it does cast doubt on the idea that there is a continuous tradition from Cavaillès to Foucault that one could call a “phenomenology of the concept”.

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empirical fact of its object as a given and seeks the conditions under which such a fact is possible.27

Thompson interprets Foucault as claiming that it is the interaction between the a priori

rules themselves, as they are deployed in discursive practices, that renders those a priori

rules capable of change. In other words, the conditions of acceptability for statements

changes as new statements are introduced into discourse. Because these rules are

intrinsically pliable as a result of their interaction, ruptures and massive breaks can occur

within them, which lead to the reorganization of those rules and substantially different

forms of thinking. What is more crucial to Thompson’s argument, however, is that

Foucault, like Cavaillès, works out the relation between the transcendental and the

historical by focusing on the conditions of acceptability for statements. For Thompson,

Foucault therefore continues the tradition of the phenomenology of the concept by

describing the positive unconscious of knowledge as historical and therefore mutable but

also transcendental and therefore normative. Consequently, Thompson sees Foucault as

engaged in a description of the historical essences that constitute experience, which are

conceived as a priori rules for the acceptability of statements.

3.2.2 Koopman’s Critique

Koopman challenges Thompson’s on three points. First, he argues that it is

inconsistent with Foucault’s aversion to transcendental philosophy. Second, he argues

that the kind of interpretation Thompson extrapolates commits Foucault to a problematic 27 Thompson, “Historicity and Transcendentality,” pp. 15-6. Never does Foucault use the distinctively phenomenological locution “imaginative variation” and never does he suggest, as Thompson quite liberally suggests, that Foucault is in the business of “eidetic description”. Foucault does say that he undertakes a “pure description of the facts of discourse” (EW2 306/DE1 No 59, 705), but given Foucault’s discernable distaste for all things Platonic, it strikes me as lacking in felicity to describe archaeological description as “eidetic”. I shall have more complaints along this line in Section 3.3.

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methodology insofar as it is incapable of accounting for historical change. Third, he

argues that even if Foucault once adopted in his archaeological writings the problematic

view attributed to him, he ultimately abandons it when he turns to developing his critical

philosophy in his later works. Throughout my explication of Koopman’s claims I shall

provide some independent support for them.

In the first case, Koopman questions the strength of Thompson’s claim that

because Foucault identifies himself with a tradition borne of Cavaillès’ alleged

transformation of transcendental phenomenology Foucault is best understood as also

engaged in transforming transcendental phenomenology. Neither Cavaillès nor Foucault

distinguish between the phenomenology of the subject and the “phenomenology of the

concept,” which is an invention of Thompson’s making. Instead, both Cavaillès and

Foucault distinguish between a philosophy of the subject or consciousness, on the one

hand, and, on the other hand, a philosophy of the concept or conceptuality.28

28 Thompson quotes Cavaillès as saying, “It is not a philosophy of consciousness but a philosophy of the concept that can provide a theory of science. The generative necessity is not that of an activity,

Koopman

does not dispute Thompson’s assertion that this latter form of philosophy is, as Foucault

says, “rooted in phenomenology” and passed on to him “by way of Cavaillès via

Bachelard and through Georges Canguilhem” (WC 54). But Koopman rightly points out

that the mere fact that Foucault’s philosophical forebears are “rooted in phenomenology”

does not mean Foucault himself is engaged in phenomenological description of any kind.

Indeed, it is not entirely clear if Foucault means that the philosophy of the concept is

“rooted in phenomenology” as a form of phenomenology or as fundamentally resistant to

transcendental subjectivity and phenomenological description. This alternative

but that of a dialectic.” See Thompson, “Historicity and Transcendentality,” p. 11.

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description of Foucault’s gesture toward phenomenology is supported by the fact that, as

Koopman points out, he closes his article on Canguilhem by saying that the latter had

“decisive importance” for “rethink[ing] the question of the subject because “the cogito

remained central” to phenomenology in France (EW2 477/DE4 No 361, 776). This seems

to suggest that while Foucault might have adopted Cavaillès problem, he is not engaged

in phenomenological description.

The fact that Thompson cannot rule out an alternative interpretation of texts that

are crucial to his interpretation does not, of course, exclude the possibility that

Foucaultian archaeology is best understood as a new form of phenomenological

description. But Koopman is hard-pressed to find a good reason to render Foucault’s

hostility to transcendental phenomenology consistent with a phenomenological reading of

archaeology. Canguilhem himself, Koopman notes, witnessed Foucault “disparage”

anything that implied the latter’s work is some kind of transcendental philosophy.29

In the second case, Koopman goes on to contend that the phenomenological

interpretation of Foucault’s methodology is unappealing because it attributes to the latter

Evidence is also provided by Koopman from the conclusion of Archaeology, where

Foucault states his expressed aim as freeing “the history of thought from its subjection to

transcendence,” cleansing it “of all transcendental narcissism,” and “free[ing] history

from the grip of phenomenology” (AK 203/AS 264-5). It would seem, then, that given

these facts the plausibility of interpreting Foucault as engaged in phenomenological

description is supported merely by the claim that he is engaged in trying to unify the

transcendental and the historical in the concept of the historical a priori.

29 Koopman, “Historical Critique or Transcendental Critique,” p. 106-7.

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a philosophically untenable view that Foucault eventually distanced himself from. The

mistake that Foucault apparently realized is that archaeology left little room for historical

change and the ability human agents to render change. The problem is, in short, that

Foucault talks far too much about the necessitation of thought by contingent historical

rules. One can get a sense of this necessity in the concept of the “historical a priori,”

which as a priori it must be necessitating but as historical it is only contingently

necessitating or necessitating for a particular historical period. Dreyfus and Rabinow and

more recently Béatrice Han point to this fact in Foucault’s liberal descriptions of the rules

of acceptability, for example, as “the general regime of rules to which the status of […]

statements is subjected [le régime général auquel est soumis le statut de… énoncés]” (AK

115/AS 151) and the “laws” that govern statements (AK 116/AS 153, 173/226).30

do the fleeting periods of transition, however confused they may be, possess a historical a priori? If not, then it follows that there are historical periods which an archaeological analytic cannot engage. If so, then it follows that the historian needs another analytic in addition to (or perhaps instead of) archaeology in order to wield a more complete historiographical toolkit.

But if

these contingent rules are necessitating, it becomes mysterious how their transformation

is possible. Defenders of this robust concept of the historical a priori might appeal to the

fact that, according to Foucault changes occur as eruptions of thought in the interplay

between rules of acceptability. “But, Koopman asks:

31

In other words, Foucault can point to the fact of change, but he cannot analyze it himself,

since archaeological description concerns only where (allegedly) transcendental

30 See Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, Ch. 4, and Han, Foucault’s Critical Project, pp. 65-6. See also the criticisms of May, Between Genealogy and Epistemology, pp. 30-1, and May, The Philosophy of Foucault, pp. 58-9. 31 Koopman, “Historical Critique or Transcendental Critique,” p. 114.

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necessitation and historical thought coalesce. One also wonders, as Dreyfus, Rabinow,

and Han do, what it is that entitles Foucault, as an historian, to claim that these rules are

transcendentally necessitating. In other words, on what grounds can he say that subjects

must abide by these rules rather than what would be the assumed position of the historian,

which would be to describe these rules as mere regularities or generalizations derived

from examining historical facts? But if the rules that subjects act according to are mere

regularities, then what is to be made of the concept of an historical a priori? Doesn’t the

notion of the a priori as a regularity require the cancellation of its attendant notion of

necessity?

Koopman does not belabor these problems, for they are somewhat incidental to

his larger and final point. As he sees it, if there is a trace of the transcendental in

Archaeology, Foucault ultimately abandons it. The talk of historical a priori disappears,

and Foucault comes to focus his methodological energies on disclosing the historical

“conditions” and “limits” of our thinking. In this regard, there is a particularly relevant

passage from “What is Enlightenment?” that supports Koopman’s interpretation. In

describing his brand of historical critique, Foucault unequivocally declares that “criticism

is not transcendental [critique n’est pas transcendantale], and its goal is not that of

making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design and archaeology in its

method. Archaeological – and not transcendental [Archéologique – et non pas

transcendantale]” (EW1 315/DE4 No 339, 574). Foucault distances himself from

transcendental philosophy not once, but twice. In the first case, he emphasizes that his

project is not the Kantian project of determining the a priori conditions and limits of

knowledge. In the second case, he emphasizes that his archaeological method in

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particular is not transcendental. Foucault does not seem to be mincing his words here.

So, even if it is the case that he once conceived of archaeological description as a form of

transcendental-historical description, by the time of his death he had abandoned any

commitment to transcendental description.

For Koopman, Foucault ultimately came to realize that “problematization,” and

not a new transcendental method, is the core of his work.32 A “problematization,” as

Foucault defines it, is that “through which being offers itself to be, necessarily, thought –

and the practices on the basis of which these problematizations are formed” (HS2

11/17).33

32 Koopman, “Historical Critique or Transcendental Critique,” pp. 110-1.

One way of putting this point is that our practices take shape in response to

historically specific problems, and therefore the norms of practices are oriented toward

their ends by means of these problems. Archaeology, Foucault explains, describes the

“form” of practices in which a problem takes shape, while a genealogy focuses on the

“modifications” of these forms in response to a problem (HS2 11-2/17-8). Koopman

believes that when Foucault casts his project in terms of problematization it exemplifies

the fact that in his later works he is less interested – if he ever was interested – in

developing a radical new descriptive methodology than he is in focusing on the problems

that confront us as a result of our inherited practices and how those problems, and not

others, came to preoccupy us. Thus, it is practices themselves in their historical

specificity that serve as conditions of possibility of the present. Koopman therefore

argues that we must distinguish between critical conditions of possibility and

33 I focus on this ambiguous concept of “thought” in Section 3.5.1-2.

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transcendental conditions of possibility as a unique type of critical condition.34

3.2.3 Thompson’s Response

He

explains that a critical condition is simply that which is responsible for rendering possible

something, such as some aspect of a concrete historical situation, and a critical inquiry

into these conditions is an inquiry into how such conditions are also limiting on thought

or conduct. Such conditions can hold either contingently or necessarily. If a condition

holds necessarily, then it is a transcendental condition, for it enables but also absolutely

constrains or limits. Koopman argues that Foucault is not interested in disclosing the

transcendental conditions of possibility for the present, but the contingent critical

conditions of possibility for the present. Criticism is not, Foucault says, transcendental,

but it is nevertheless critical, which, according to Koopman, means that Foucault is

consequently focused on the contingent conditions of our existence as they are

manifested in the problems to which we respond and how these conditions limit us.

After Koopman issued his criticisms of Thompson, they engaged in an exchange

of critical essays, beginning with Thompson’s response to Koopman and the latter getting

the last word. Thompson argues in response that Foucault’s apparent distaste for

transcendental philosophy is not quite as apparent as Koopman believes. He contends

that Koopman fails to see that when Foucault makes critical remarks about transcendental

philosophy, he is in reality only addressing transcendental phenomenology as it is

practiced by Husserl and those who stayed within the confines of a phenomenology of the

subject, and he is not addressing the “phenomenology of the concept,” which is

34 In Section 3.2.3 below, I shall point out that while Koopman’s distinction is correct, he is curiously quiet as to what, exactly, these conditions are conditions of.

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phenomenological description free of “transcendental narcissism.” So, Thompson

contends that when Foucault says that his archaeological mission is to free history from

its dependence on transcendence, he is speaking about a particular kind of transcendental

thinking, namely, that which would submit historical inquiry to the transcendental

subject. It is, in other words, the narcissism of the transcendental subject that is

Foucault’s enemy and not transcendental philosophy simpliciter. Koopman remains

unconvinced. He grants Thompson’s claim that there are “whiffs” of transcendental

inquiry in Foucault’s archaeological writings, but argues that Foucault’s mature view has

exorcised any remnants of transcendental philosophy.35

The example from “What is Enlightenment?” provides sufficient support for the

claim that Foucault’s mature position is not a rethinking of the nature of the

transcendental. Perhaps because Koopman does not develop that passage as an example

of Foucault’s resistance to phenomenological renderings of his method, Thompson does

not respond to it. However, he does go on to press an interesting problem for Koopman’s

view. When the latter appeals to the concept of problematization to point to a non-

transcendental understanding of Foucault’s methodology, Thompson maintains that

Koopman helps himself to an interpretation of historical conditions that is not without

question. According to Thompson, the very concept that Koopman invokes –

problematization – vitiates rather than supports the latter’s view. The “proper task of a

history of thought,” Foucault says in the second volume of The History of Sexuality, is

Hence, as I noted above, in

“What is Enlightenment?” Foucault straightforwardly denies his project is transcendental

in either purpose or methodology.

35 Koopman, “Response to Thompson’s Response,” p. 131.

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“to define the conditions in which human beings ‘problematize’ what they are, what they

do, and the world in which they live” (HS2 10/16; my emphasis). Now, we already know

that on the next page Foucault indicates that practices are crucial for his concept of

problematization. But, Thompson suggests that Koopman fails to account for the

consistent use of transcendental language. So, the quote immediately above speaks of the

“conditions” responsible for a problematization, and in the quote Koopman appeals to the

fact that Foucault speaks of archaeology as examining the “forms” that generate

problems. Furthermore, in the same quote Koopman lifts as a definition of

problematization, Foucault explains that a problematization is that “through which being

offers itself to be, necessarily, thought” (HS2 11/17; my emphasis). Thompson also

points to another passage of the same text in which Foucault defines “games of truth,” or

“the games of truth and error,” as that in which “being is historically constituted as

experience” (HS 6-7/12-13). For Thompson, this suggestive language indicates a

phenomenological account that holds that “it is by virtue of these conditions that the

entire domain of givenness itself – being – is forged in such a way that the differences

between one problematization and another can mark out the border delineating specific

historical periods.”36

36 Thompson, “Response to Colin Koopman,” p. 127.

(Additionally, Koopman is curiously mute about Foucault’s

description of his project as an ontology, which counts in Thompson’s favor.) The

conditions to which Thompson is referring to is the historical a priori, or the rules of

acceptability for a given historical period. So, to put Thompson’s point differently than

he does, one could say that Foucault is offering a phenomenological account of how

objects are given to experience, which Foucault explains through the concept of the

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historical a priori. If there is doubt about the fact that Foucault sometimes suggests a

transcendental interpretation of his project, consider the following remark from the

Preface to the second volume of The History of Sexuality:

Posing the question [of a history of thought] in this way brings into play certain altogether general principles. Singular forms of experience may perfectly well harbor universal structures; they may well not be independent of the concrete determinations of social existence. However, neither those determinations nor those structures can allow for experiences (that is, for understandings of a certain type, for rules of a certain form, for certain modes of consciousness of oneself and of others) except through thought. […] That [thought] should have this historicity does not mean it is deprived of all universal form, but, rather, that the putting into play of these universal forms is itself historical. (EW1 201/DE4 No 340, 580; my emphasis)37

There is a nest of terms here – “experience,” “structures,” “forms” – that are certainly

suggestive of a methodology plausibly grounded in phenomenological description. That

is, Foucault’s terminology strongly suggests that he is, in fact, engaged in some kind of

transcendental description of the conditions of experience.

What Thompson believes Koopman misses, then, is the discernible sense in which

even in Foucault’s later philosophy he remains within the purview of transcendental

phenomenology. Because Koopman treats Foucault – quite suspiciously38

37 Cf. EW3 405/DE4 No 364, 816. Foucault says that “we are thinking beings, and we do these things not only on the ground of universal rules of behavior but also on the specific ground of a historical rationality.”

– as a

historiographical pragmatist, focusing on the way in which the present is ultimately a

product of practices, he fails to account for what it is that Foucaultian conditions are

conditions of. For Thompson, it is clear: they are conditions of possible experience.

38 Most of Koopman’s own work largely concerns two domains, Foucault and pragmatism. In his recent book, Pragmatism as Transition, Koopman ultimately defends an account of “genealogical pragmatism” that combines the thought of Dewey and Foucault (see especially Ch. 7). While Koopman is certainly entitled to this project, I am suspicious of his interpretation of Foucault’s methodology because it suspiciously ignores or questionably downplays those aspects of Foucault’s thought and philosophical heritage (whether it is phenomenology or, as I claim, Kant) that push it away from pragmatism, notably those things Foucault actually says or implies about his archaeological method.

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Given Foucault’s claimed lineage in the tradition of the “phenomenology of the concept,”

his methodology is therefore best understood as a rethinking of phenomenology. But, it

is then entirely bizarre that, as it turns out, Thompson is wrong to see Foucault as

engaged in transcendental philosophy, since Foucault himself straightforwardly denies

this fact in “What is Enlightenment?”, and yet the language and concepts of (allegedly)

phenomenology appear in even Foucault’s later writings and in addition to his earlier, and

by far most extended, treatment of his archaeological method. Koopman ultimately

admits that the exegetical dispute cannot be satisfactorily resolved, but digs in his heels,

saying:

If Foucault is indebted to phenomenologists such as Cavaillès, then my view is that his debt here does not extend to any of the transcendental aspects of the phenomenological project […]When Foucault sniffed out remnant whiffs of transcendentality in his archaeological methodology, he felt compelled to first quip about the “transcendental narcissism” in his phenomenological inheritance, and then to revise his methodology such that an analytic of archaeology-plus-genealogy could be employed in a way that would avoid the project of transcendental analysis essential to every version of phenomenology. Foucault was a historical thinker, not a transcendental thinker.39

The question for Koopman, however, is if in the end Foucault is neither a transcendental

philosopher nor phenomenologist, why does the language of transcendental philosophy

remain in his later writings despite the fact that he allegedly, according to Koopman,

purged it from his mature philosophy? Why introduce the language of critical conditions

and their Kantian sense if Foucault is really a transcendental philosopher at all? On the

one hand, we cannot accept Thompson’s view because Foucault unqualifiedly demands

that both his critical project and archaeological method are not to be understood as

transcendental, and yet, on the other hand, we cannot fully accept Koopman’s 39 Koopman, “Response to Thompson’s Response,” p. 131.

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interpretation because he simply does not do justice to the concepts and terms in

Foucault’s writings.40

Below I will argue that Foucault’s mature historical methodology is not, as

Koopman claims, transcendental and yet, contrary to Koopman and in congruence with

Thompson, it is aimed at uncovering the conditions of actual experience. We might agree

with Thompson that Foucault took up Cavaillès’ problem in Archaeology,

41

40 I should note that Koopman does offer a reply to Thompson’s response. See Koopman, “Response to Thompson’s Response”. However, I have actually developed Thompson’s response into what I believe is a more convincing case against Koopman that undercuts the latter’s response to Thompson.

but, along

with Koopman, I think we cannot help but see Foucault as having abandoned that

problem altogether, if he actually adopted it at all. In the first case, and I will not expand

the claim here, it conflicts with Foucault’s own distinction, noted in Section 2.4.2 of the

previous chapter, between formal and historical a priori, for it posits, quite strangely, not

one but two transcendental levels of thinking, the genuinely transcendental and the

historically transcendental. In the second case, Thompson rather underhandedly

interprets the crucial concept of 1969’s Archaeology, the historical a priori, in light of

later writings, notably Foucault’s use of Canguilhem’s distinction between true

statements and a statement’s being ‘within the true,’ which is first evidenced in the 1971

lecture The Order of Discourse. There is some continuity between those texts, but only

in the latter (and other later writings) does Foucault introduce what was precisely lacking

in Archaeology, namely, that the rules of discursive practices understood as socially

imposed constraints on thought and conduct. Most importantly, however, is the fact that

41 One point in favor of Thompson’s claim that Foucault attempts to combine the transcendental and the historical is found in the very objection to Foucault’s concept of the historical a priori noted in the previous subsection. As noted, Foucault sometimes suggests that the rules of discursive practices are necessitating, meaning that subjects are obliged to follow, which lends credence to the view that Foucault believes they hold with the necessity characteristic of the a priori.

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Foucault is not furthering phenomenology in any form. His methodological

commitments are, I will show, fundamentally Kantian. In Section 3.5 I will present an

interpretation of the Kantian conceptual apparatus that accompanies Foucault’s

methodology and cast his philosophy as fundamentally about how human beings

constitute themselves as subjects. First, however, I would like to motivate my view and

provide some of the necessary background in Kant’s philosophy.

3.3 Foucault’s Clue

The year following the 1970 English translation of Lets Mots et les choses,

essayist George Steiner produced a scathing but not unfair review of Foucault’s text.

Steiner praises the author for his erudition and ability to capture the thought of the

historical periods he examines. Nevertheless, Steiner criticizes Foucault for succumbing

to the opacity of the French philosophical scene, as evident, Steiner asserts, in the

former’s tendency for verbosity, unverifiable and sweeping generalizations, and

“sibylline loftiness”.42 At one point, Steiner jabs at Foucault’s intellectual cliquishness in

asking about the methodological term employed in the subtitle, “[W]hy ‘archaeology’?

The word has its aura of depth and genesis, outside its normal field, since Freud.”43

Freud’s usage of the term ‘archaeology,’ popular in France in phenomenological circles

from its usage by Husserl, Fink, and Merleau-Ponty, is meant as a metaphor for the

‘excavation’ of the unconscious of a patient by the psychoanalyst.44

42 Steiner, “The Mandarin of the Hour”.

According to

43 Ibid., p. 399. 44 For more on Freud’s conception of archaeology, see Lawlor, Thinking Through French Philosophy, Ch. 2 passim. In addition to Freud’s use of the term archaeology, Lawlor notes that both Edmund Husserl and

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Steiner, this sort of esotericism shrouds a needlessly complicated and lengthy, but

sometimes brilliant, work of historiography.

Foucault wrote a short response in 1971, where he makes a special point about his

own use of the term ‘archaeology’. It seems that he is trying to distance his conception of

the term from any others – save Kant:

Mr. Steiner does not know that Kant used this word [archaeology] in order to designate the history of that which renders necessary a certain form of thought. I have pointed to this use, however, in another text. Certainly, I would not presume that Mr. Steiner should read me. But he should leaf through Kant. I well know, however, that Kant is not as fashionable as Freud. (MiC 60/DE2 No 97, 221-2)

Although Kant does refer to archaeologies of both nature and art in the Critique of the

Power of Judgment,45 and an archaeology of nature in Anthropology from a Pragmatic

Point of View,46

Maurice Merleau-Ponty use the term to refer to the “sedimentation” of thought that occurs in thinking over time.

in those places Kant does not use the term ‘archaeology’ in the way

Foucault describes it, namely, as designating a history of that which renders necessary a

certain form of thought. So, the passage of Kant’s that Foucault is in all likelihood

indicating is Kant’s jotting, “Of a Philosophizing History of Philosophy,” which contains

45 “If the name natural history that has been adopted for the description of nature is to remain in use, then one can call that which it literally means, namely a representation of the ancient condition of the earth – about which, even though there is no hope for certainty, there is reasonable ground for making conjectures – the archaeology of nature, in contrast to that of art. To the former belong fossils, just as to the latter belong carved stones, etc. For since we are really constantly if also, as is fitting, slowly working on such an archaeology (under the name of a theory of the earth), this name would not be given to a merely imaginary branch of research into nature, but to one to which nature itself invites and summons us” (CPJ 5:428). 46 “Burial mounds and mausoleums are signs of remembrance of the dead, just as pyramids are also everlasting reminders of the former greater power of a king. – Layers of shells in regions far from the sea, the holes of Pholades in the high Alps, or volcanic residue where no fire now burns forth from the earth, signify to us the ancient condition of the world and establish an archaeology of nature. However, they are not as plainly visible as the scarred-over wounds of a warrior. – The ruins of Palmyra, Baalbek, and Persepolis are telling monuments of the state of art in ancient states, and sad indications of the change of all things” (APP 7:193).

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ideas for the latter’s posthumously published essay, What Real Progress has Metaphysics

Made in Germany Since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff? The passage reads:

A philosophical history of philosophy is itself possible, not historically or empirically, but rationally, i.e., a priori. For although it establishes facts of reason, it does not borrow them from historical narrative, but draws them from the nature of human reason, as philosophical archaeology. (TP 20:341)

There is not much in Kant’s conception of a philosophical archaeology that is worthwhile

for Foucault, for he is by no means interested in undertaking a history that would account

for the inherent rational order of philosophy. But why would Foucault ever so quietly

refer Steiner to this passage at all if it has no significance? It might be that Foucault is

merely pointing out that the term is not esoteric to those who know a bit of philosophy.

That might certainly be the case. Foucault is, however, being disingenuous, for the

jottings to Kant’s essay are by no means statements that even those familiar with Kant’s

philosophy would be aware of, and they are certainly not something one discovers by

simply ‘leafing through’ Kant’s texts. Foucault goes on to say that he has pointed to

Kant’s usage of the term in another text, which the editors of Dits et écrits claim is Part

IV of 1969’s L’Archéologie du savoir, “Archaeological Description”.47

His statement is too ambiguous to arrive at a definitive answer to this question.

But it seems to me that Foucault’s conception of archaeology must be cast in light of

The curious

thing about it is that Foucault never does explicitly address Kant’s conception of

archaeology anywhere – not in Archaeology, not in essays, not in interviews. Why on

earth, then, would he say that he had specifically pointed to Kant’s usage of the term

archaeology?

47 DE2 No 97, 221, n. 2.

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Kant’s philosophy for two reasons. First, he dismisses current conceptions of

archaeology and, secondly, he suggests that the significance of his conception lies in

Kant’s conception of archaeology as determining that which renders necessary a certain

form of thought. Thus, I think we should see Foucault as pointing to Archaeology as his

attempt to undertake an account of that which renders necessary a certain form of

thought. There are several points that follow from the truth of this claim. First, the

archaeological method is not an attempt to work out a new phenomenological method; if

anything, Foucault is adopting the term archaeology as the title of a transcendental

history. Second, the first point suggests that Kant, and not Cavaillès, is the original

source of thinking the transcendental and the historical at once. This point acquires some

tangential support insofar as Foucault had, in a now lost early essay, explored the notion

of the historical a priori in the works of Hegel.48

With this last point in mind, I would like to suppose for the sake of argument that

Archaeology is Foucault’s considered attempt to provide a transcendental history as

Thompson represents it. Following Koopman, I argued above in Section 3.2.2 that

Foucault eventually decisively claims that his methodology is not transcendental.

Third, given Foucault’s description of

Kantian archaeology as that which renders necessary a certain form of thought,

Thompson’s claim that archaeology is the attempt to unify the transcendental and the

historical does acquire some plausibility. But this attempt, if it is indeed undertaken,

seems to be best understood within the purview of Kant’s transcendental idealism and not

transcendental phenomenology. So, if Foucault does see in Cavaillès’ treatise a way of

addressing phenomenology, he addresses it, I believe, with Kantian resources.

48 Han, Foucault’s Critical Project, p. 200, n. 6.

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“Archaeological – and not transcendental,” Foucault says (EW1 315/DE4 No 339, 574).

While Thompson might say (as he does in response to Koopman’s interpretation of

Foucault’s description of archaeology as without “transcendental narcissism”) what

Foucault really means is “not the transcendental phenomenology of the subject,” this is

forcing things, particularly given that as far back as 1972 Foucault says, “In all of my

work I strive […] to avoid any reference to this transcendental as a condition of

possibility for any knowledge” (FL 98/DE2 No 109, 373). But the reason that one might

qualify these claims is that it does appear that Foucault’s concept of the historical a priori

is a combination of historicity and transcendentality. Indeed, as I pointed out in Section

3.2.2, Foucault seems to want to say that subjects are obliged to follow the rules of the

historical a priori.

It is on precisely this point that it seems to me that Thompson takes too many

liberties with his interpretation. One will notice that he interprets Archaeology in light of

The Order of Discourse, for it is only within the latter, which appears a year after

Archaeology, that Foucault invokes Canguilhem’s distinction between true statements

and a statement’s being within the true. The chief failure of Archaeology, as both

Dreyfus and Rabinow and Han point out, is that Foucault describes the rules of discursive

practices, which collectively form the historical a priori, as mere regularities (which is

the appropriate position of the empirical historian) and also as obliging. How can

regularities and obligations be thought together? It is in order to solve this problem that

Foucault invokes Canguilhem’s distinction, but within a specific hypothesis:

Here then is the hypothesis I want to advance […] I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert

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its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality. (OD 216/10-11)

He continues, “In short, a proposition must fulfill some onerous and complex conditions

before it can be admitted within a discipline [i.e., discursive practice]; before it can be

pronounced true or false it must be, as Monsieur Canguilhem might say, ‘within the

true’” (OD 224/35-6). And finally, “Disciplines constitute a system of control in the

production of discourse, fixing its limits through the action of an identity taking the form

of a permanent reactivation of the rules” (OD 224/37-8). So, Foucault says that “one

would only be in the true […] if one obeyed the rules of some discursive ‘policy [police]’

which would have to be reactivated every time one spoke” (OD 224/37). The view that

Foucault is sketching here is, I think, a response to the noted problem in his account in

Archaeology. Foucault altogether lacked an explanation why individuals are obliged to

follow the rules of discursive practices. Now, however, it is clear: the rules of discursive

practices are socially imposed constraints on conduct. In other words, Foucault had

claimed that there are historical rules responsible for the constitution of the subject. But

he had no explanation for how they constitute the subject. So, he turns to explaining

these rules as a form of social constraint. That is, he explains the historicity of these rules

by appealing to their sociality. The rules of practices are self-regulating because we

regulate ourselves and others according to their rules.

Furthermore, Thompson interprets Archaeology in light of the later essay, “What

is Critique?” It is there that Foucault describes the archaeological level of analysis as a

form of regressive analysis, “proceeding from the fact of acceptance to the system of

acceptability analyzed through the knowledge-power interplay” (WC 61). Again,

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archaeology analyzes the rules of practices as forms of social constraints. The problem

with Thompson’s interpretation of Archaeology and the historical a priori in particular is

that he helps himself to later writings that are by no means obviously continuous or even

consistent with the former text. In short, Foucault does not explicitly develop the

conceptual architecture of the social constraints on discourse as part of his methodology

until after Archaeology, but it is plausibly the case that he develops that architecture

precisely to rectify the view he offers in Archaeology. He did not explain why subjects

follow the rules of the historical a priori, and through the concept of social constraints he

accounts for it – and without the conceptual problem of the historical necessitation of

thought.

It is worth noting, too, how well this interpretation fits with Foucault’s later denial

that neither his critical philosophy nor archaeological method are transcendental in

nature. If archaeology ever was conceived as transcendental, which is a claim that is

certainly plausible given what Foucault says and which is suggested by the Kantian

background of the term ‘archaeology,’ then I think we must see him as abandoning such a

project in order to focus on the socially normative rules of practices as conditions of

actual experience. So, I think we should see Foucault’s concept of the historical a priori

as indicating historical conditions of experience, understood as the socially imposed rules

of practices, and which do not purport to possess anything like a transcendental status.

Let me now begin to defend this claim by providing some relevant details of Kant’s first

Critique.

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3.4 Kant and the Form of Experience

Kant frames his task in the first Critique as that of determining whether reason is

capable of having synthetic a priori knowledge of reality, or pure cognitions of objects,

independently of the experience of sensible particulars. A critique of pure reason

questions what grounds must be necessary for such a priori knowledge to be attained

and, as such, it “does not aim at the amplification of cognitions themselves but only at

their correction, and is to supply the touchstone of the worth or worthlessness of all

cognitions a priori” (CPR A12/B26). A critique of reason is a “getting to the bottom of

the primary sources of our cognition” (CPR A758/B786) by which reason’s theoretical

claims about objects can be evaluated. Where theoretical knowledge aspires to know

objects themselves independently of experience, a “transcendental critique” (CPR

A12/B26) is “occupied not so much with objects but rather with our a priori concepts of

objects in general” (CPR A11/B25). In other words, a transcendental critique

investigates the claims of reason by looking into the conditions of the possibility of

representations themselves.

Kant therefore distinguishes between general logic and transcendental logic.

Logic concerns the form of thinking (CPR A54/B78), and where general logic is the set

of rules that are disclosed through abstracting entirely from the content of thoughts

toward the logical form of the relations of thoughts, which hold of necessity for thinking

in general, transcendental logic considers the logical form involved in how thoughts are

related a priori to their contents (CPR A55-7/B79-82). The business of all logic in

abstracting is to break down both the faculties of the understanding and reason into their

elements, and then present these elements for the logical assessment of our cognition

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(CPR A60/B84). This part of logic, Kant says, is “analytic” and it is “the negative

touchstone of truth, since one must before all else examine and evaluate by means of

these rules to find out whether with regard to the object it contains positive truth” (CPR

A60/B84-5). So, a transcendental analytic would provide the negative touchstone of truth

or the identity of thought with its object by articulating the rules that hold for such a

relation. Since all thought possesses content by means of intuitions, the transcendental

analytic is the “logic of truth” that “expounds the elements of the pure cognition of the

understanding and the principles without which no object can thought at all” (CPR

A62/B87). If the elements or rules of the transcendental analytic are contradicted,

thought is in conflict with itself and therefore loses all connection with truth.

The faculty analyzed in the Transcendental Analytic is that of the understanding.

While the understanding is also the faculty whose functions are broken down in a general

logic, an essential feature of all thinking is that thoughts possess content, and that content

is given by sensible intuition, or the manifold of sense as received by the pure intuitions

of space and time. The understanding, Kant tells us, is the “faculty for thinking of

objects of sensible intuition” (CPR A51/B75). In the Jäsche Logic, about the

understanding Kant says that it is:

to be regarded in general as the source and the faculty for thinking rules in general. For as sensibility is the faculty of intuitions, so the understanding is the faculty for thinking, i.e., for bringing the representations of the senses under rules. Hence it is desirous of seeking for rules and is satisfied when it has found them. (JL 9:11-2)

The understanding “is always busy poring through the appearances with the aim of find

some sort of rule in them” (CPR A126). So, “the faculty of rules,” Kant says, is a

“designation [for the understanding that] is more fruitful” becomes it “comes closer to its

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essence” (CPR A126). The importance of this fact is that a logic of any sort, for Kant, is

an articulation of rules that hold for either the relations of thoughts or the internal relation

of a thought to its content. In Kant’s technical vocabulary rules and concepts are

identical, “All cognition requires a concept, however imperfect or obscure it may be; but

as far as its form is concerned the latter is something general, and something that serves

as a rule” (CPR A106). Hence, Kant prefaces his description of the understanding as a

faculty of rules by defining the understanding as “a faculty for thinking, or a faculty of

concepts, or also of judgments” (CPR A126). The understanding is not, obviously, also

the faculty of judgment, but rather the faculty that supplies the form of judgment, as the

power of judgment is to put the particulars of sensible intuitions under a concept provided

by the understanding. Concepts, then, are the rules that provide the organization of

sensible intuitions, and understanding is the “birthplace” of rules for thinking about

objects (CPR A65/B90-1).

The task of the Transcendental Analytic is to determine how thought is capable of

possessing content. With the architecture of cognition in place as the combination of

sensible intuitions and concepts, Kant investigates how it is that concepts and intuitions

are brought into relation at all. But rather than analyzing the concept itself, or “the unity

of the action or ordering different representations under a common” (CPR A68/B93),

Kant analyzes the nature of the action of the unity that as it is exhibited in judgments.

The broadest function of the understanding is to render unity among appearances through

concepts into a cognition or experience. So, the task of the Transcendental Analytic then

becomes determining how it is possible at all for the understanding to render a unity of

sensible intuitions into cognition. The analysis of concepts cannot therefore be adequate

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to the task, since this would be explaining the very nature of unity in cognition according

to individual functions of unity. A unity of cognition, Kant goes on to claim, is rendered

by the categories, which “are in turn nothing other than forms of thought, which contain

merely the logical capacity for unifying the manifold given in intuition in a consciousness

a priori” (CPR A248/B305-6). The categories are “concepts of objects in general” and

“lie at the ground of all experiential cognition as a priori conditions” or “a priori

concepts,” and “through them alone is experience possible (as far as the form of thinking

is concerned)” (CPR A93/B126).

When the forms of thought, the categories, are combined with forms of

appearance, the pure intuitions of space and time, there is discursive cognition. Both sets

of pure forms comprise the formal conditions of experience or what Kant occasionally

refers to as the “form of experience”. He says, for example:

There is only one experience, in which all perceptions are represented as in thoroughgoing and lawlike connection, just as there is only one space and time, in which all forms of appearance and all relation of being or non-being take place. If one speaks of different experiences, they are only so many perceptions insofar as they belong to one and the same universal experience. The thoroughgoing and synthetic unity of perceptions is precisely what constitutes the form of experience, and it is nothing other than the synthetic unity of the appearances in accordance with concepts [i.e., the categories]. (CPR A110; my emphasis)

And:

The postulate of the possibility of things thus requires that their concept agree with the formal conditions of an experience in general. This, however, namely the objective form of experience in general, contains all synthesis that is requisite for the cognition of objects. (CPR A220/B2677; my emphasis)

Kant’s notion here is straightforward: the form of experience is the synthetic unity of

experience rendered by the pure intuitions of space and time as subjected to the

categories. The pure forms of thought and the pure forms of intuition work in conformity

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to render a unity of experience, and therefore thinking is dependent upon sensible

intuitions and the latter only capable of being conceptualized according to the categories.

Both the forms of intuitions and the forms of thought are essential for cognition.

Both make experience possible and therefore stand as its enabling conditions. Without

these conditions we would not, Kant thinks, possess discursive experience. But, to bring

things full circle, it is the forms of thought derived in the Transcendental Analytic that

provide the rule of truth for cognitions. Kant thinks that all experience is no doubt bound

to sensible intuitions, but this dependence alone does not make thoughts possess content.

Of course, as Kant famously says, “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions

without concepts are blind” (CPR A51/B75), but it is the categories, conceived as

necessary rules for the unification of that which is given in sensible experience, that make

thoughts possess content and supply the possibility of truth as the agreement between

thought and object. That is, the categories specify the conditions according to which

thought is capable of possessing content and therefore enable the possibility of the

content of thought being in agreement with its object.

Because the categories are rules that are present in all thinking, Kant understands

that our experience is shot through with rules. He makes this point emphatically at the

opening of his Jäsche Logic:

Everything in nature, both in the lifeless and in the living world, takes place according to rules, although we are not always acquainted with these rules. - Water falls according to laws of gravity, and with animals locomotion also takes place according to rules. The fish in water, the bird in the air, move according to rules. The whole of nature in general is really nothing but a connection of appearances according to rules; and there is no absence of rules anywhere. If we believe we have found such a thing, then in this case we can only say that we are not acquainted with the rules. (JL 9:11)

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According to Kant, this means that the objects of our experience are subject to the rules

that we impose upon them, and first subject to those rules because no object is capable of

being thought without the imposition of the categories on appearances. This view has the

logical consequence that all objects are constructed in thought through concepts. Of

course, Kant strenuously argues that this is not the same as Berkeleyan or Leibnizian

idealism, since the empirical consciousness of time requires that there are empirical

determinants of the objects one perceives (CPR B275). Furthermore, even though the

objects of our experience are dependent upon our concepts, this does not entail that those

concepts are not accurately representative of the objects and properties of objects to

which they refer. This view has consequences for ontology.

Kant explains that ontology or “general metaphysics” is the inquiry into being qua

being at the most abstract level. In thinking through things in general, the metaphysician

attempts to arrive at a priori cognitions of them, which is to discern a priori their

essential predicates (LM 28:541). According to Kant, traditional metaphysics assumes

an immediate connection between human conceptuality and things in themselves, which

overlooks a crucial question. “The first and most important question in ontology,” Kant

says, “is: how are a priori cognitions possible? This question must be solved first, for the

whole of ontology is based on the solution of this question” (LM 28:542). Without

asking this question Kant thinks that metaphysicians assume that because certain

categories are necessary for our thinking, which they no doubt are according to Kant, that

it follows that they are also necessary for objects themselves. Kant explains:

To think of an object and to cognize an object are thus not the same. For two components belong to cognition: first, the concept, through which an object is thought at all (the category), and second, the intuition, through which it is given;

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for if an intuition corresponding to the concept could not be given at all, then it would be a thought are as the form is concerned, but without any object, and by its means no cognition of anything at all would be possible, since, as far I would know nothing would be given nor could be given to which my thought could be applied. (CPR B146)

Kant maintains that all thought is bound to the form of experience, and that the categories

that metaphysicians have taken to apply to things in themselves are merely immanent to

our thinking of objects and therefore do not apply to things in themselves. He concludes

that ontology therefore:

actually [thinks] of no thing – one is occupied with the nature of the understanding for thinking of things – here we have the concepts through which we think things, namely, the pure concepts of reason – hence it is the science of the principles of pure understanding and of pure reason. (LM 29:752)

The practitioner of ontology is correct in believing that there are pure concepts; however,

those pure concepts are only a priori modes of our cognition of objects (i.e., the

categories) or as inferential consequences of those a priori modes (i.e., transcendental

ideas).

This entails the end of traditional ontology. Because “we can cognize of things a

priori only what we ourselves have put into them” (CPR Bxvii), Kant says that traditional

ontology “must give way to the modest one of a mere analytic of the pure understanding”

(CPR A247/B303). The traditional ontologist confuses the categories for the nature of

things themselves, not realizing that the categories specify the conditions for thoughts to

be able to possess content. Traditional ontology thusly violates the rule of truth

expounded in the Transcendental Analytic. However, from this Analytic, Kant says,

“there emerges a whole science of Ontology as immanent thinking, i.e., a science of that

thinking in which the objective reality of the concepts employed can be established with

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certainty” (C 11:314).49

3.5 Foucault and Forms of Experience

This ontology is immanent, Kant says, because its objects are

the necessary predicates of being, but as required by our own thinking. Thus, ontology is

transformed from the a priori investigation of things into the a priori investigation of our

thinking about things, for it is in thinking that objects are constituted, not in terms of their

existence, but in terms of their form. Ontology is therefore immanent because it concerns

all of the pure concepts that are immanent in our thinking about objects, and it is the

science of the forms of thought.

In the previous section I explained that in the Transcendental Analytic Kant

argues that the pure categories of the understanding, the forms of thought, are rules that

enable the cognition of objects and also constrain what kinds of judgments can possess

objective validity. I also explained how Kant understands an analytic as ontology, as an

account of how the forms immanent to thought are constitutive of the objects of

experience. My chief insight in this section is that the conceptual structure of Foucault’s

historical ontology should be read in light of the Transcendental Analytic. On my

interpretation, the rules of acceptability are, in the first case, rules as both the categories

and concepts are rules for Kant, and also both enabling insofar as they constitute the

forms of the objects of experience and constraining insofar as they delimit acceptable

conduct. The objects of experience that Foucault has in mind must, however, be

conceived narrowly; that is, he is only concerned with how human beings constitute, and

therefore experience, themselves as objects. So, for Foucault, the forms of experience, I

49 I have followed Longuenesse’s rendering of this passage. See Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, p. 398.

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will show, are also constitutive of subjects, for it is according to the rules of acceptability,

conceived as forms, that subjects conduct themselves – in short, how they constitute their

experience. Consequently, an historical ontology, like Kantian transcendental critique,

gets to bottom of the historical sources of our experience, which are sources conceived as

rules for unifying experience.

The manner in which I will proceed to defend this interpretation of Foucault’s

historical ontology begins with some conceptual explication. I focus on the significance

of his terms “ontology” and “thought,” and work my way down to hashing out his

concept of “forms of experience” as the proper object of historical ontology. I then

explicate these forms as rules, or, more specifically, rules of acceptability, finally relating

it back to Kant’s Analytic.

3.5.1 Ontology and Thought

In “What is Enlightenment?,” Foucault describes his project as a “critical

ontology of ourselves” (EW1 319/DE4 No 339, 577), which is “a critique of what we are

saying, thinking, and doing [i.e., human conduct], through a historical ontology of

ourselves” (EW1 315/DE4 No 339, 573-4). The first item of note in this statement is that

Foucault conceives his critical ontology as possessing the power of criticism because of

the fact that the ontology he undertakes is historical in nature. The conjunction of

criticism with the historical is also correlated in the pseudonymous essay, “Foucault”.

There he says, “To the extent that Foucault fits into the philosophical tradition, it is the

critical tradition of Kant, and his project could be called a Critical History of Thought”

(EW2 459/DE4 No 345, 631). By describing his project as a “critical history of thought,”

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he combines “critical” and “history” in a way that suggests a critical history of thought

and a critical-historical ontology are identical projects. Given that Foucault uses both of

these descriptions as general titles for his project it appears safe to presume that a

“historical ontology” just is a “history of thought”. If this is correct, then it yields a

different sense of the object of historical ontology. Instead of “ourselves,” the object of

historical ontology is thought. So, now we are presented with two questions. What is

“thought” that it could be the object of an ontology? What does “thought” have to do

with “ourselves”?

The Preface to the second volume of The History of Sexuality is crucial for

correlating the two proposed objects of historical ontology, thought and ourselves.

There, Foucault explains that a “history of thought” takes as its object of study “the very

historicity of the forms of experience” (EW1 200/DE4 No 340, 580). Thought is, in other

words, cashed out by Foucault as forms of experience. Given what we already know of

historical ontology as identical to a history of thought, we can form the following

conditional. If the object of historical ontology is thought, and a history of thought is the

study of forms of experience in their historicity, then it follows that historical ontology

studies the forms of experience in their historicity. By the same token, this means that

the object of a history of thought is ourselves; more specifically, the object of a history of

thought is how we are constituted and experience ourselves. Thus, we can conclude that

the terms “thought” and “ourselves” are united by the concept of “forms of experience,”

and therefore Foucault’s historical ontology, or history of thought, analyzes ourselves by

disclosing the forms of experience in which we conduct ourselves. We can go even

further in identifying thought and forms of experience, for at one point Foucault himself

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combines thought and forms of experience in the locution “forms of thought [formes de

la pensée]” (EW1 202/DE4 No 340, 581). A history of thought or a historical ontology is

a study of the forms of experience, which Foucault identifies with the forms of thought.

One can see already that I am setting up historical ontology in such a way as to

relate it directly back to Kant. There is a certain tenor to these concepts and correlations

that is undeniably reminiscent of Kant’s Analytic. But there is an immediate worry in

doing so. One might protest that the language of forms of experience and forms of

thought is underdetermined, for it also appears in the history of phenomenology from

Husserl to Merleau-Ponty.50 I do not want to dispute this point, and neither do I want to

simplify Foucault’s methods to being a mere simplistic reproduction of Kant’s Analytic.

Reading Foucault’s work on the body in light of, say, Merleau-Ponty’s work on

embodiment is going to be far more productive than reading Foucault’s work on this

topic in light of Kant.51

Nevertheless, there are several points to keep in mind. First, as Koopman

protests, Foucault is resistant to describing his work as phenomenological. One might

understand this resistance as complete, or as Thompson claims it is freeing “eidetic

description” from the grips of the philosophy of the subject.

Because Foucault is rarely ever clear about his commitments and

influences, there are perhaps several lines of interpretation one could take regarding the

conceptual apparatus that appears in his descriptions of his project.

52

50 See, for example, Husserl, Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge, §46.

But it is worth pointing

out – and this is a claim that requires more defense that I have space here – that Foucault

51 See, for example, Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception. 52 Thompson, “Response to Colin Koopman,” p. 124.

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never talks about the hallmark phenomenological concepts – essences, meaning,

reduction, intentionality, etc. – and if he does it is mostly in the context of an assault upon

them. So, while Thompson claims that Foucault designs archaeology as a form of

historical eidetic description, which seeks the “essences” of our experience, Foucault

himself talks of forms and rules. There is a gap, I suggest, between what Foucault

actually says and any strong phenomenological account of his project. The best

explanation of his use of such language is, I think, his Kantian heritage. This is more

convincing if we recall that it is Kant who supplies Foucault with his critical ethos.

Perhaps more significantly, in “What is Enlightenment?” he contrasts in a positive

manner historical ontology with Kantian criticism. He says, “Criticism indeed consists of

analyzing and reflecting upon limits,” and he is clear that “limits” here are to be

understood in the Kantian sense. Of course, the limits of reason’s rightful use are

established by the form of experience, which means the conditions of receptivity and the

“forms of thought”. Thus, the forms of experience or forms of thought, on Foucaultian

terms, are to be conceived as limits as Kant understands them, which means conditions of

validity and therefore invalidity. For Foucault, however, they are conditions of

acceptability. If I am correct about this, then we ought to be able to establish with a

significant degree of conviction that the forms of experience are rules of acceptability in

the same way the categories comprise the “rule of truth” for judgments, namely, as rules

that both enable experience of ourselves and constrain our conduct.

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3.5.2 Forms of Experience and Games of Truth

So, the question that remains is, What is a form of experience and what is the

importance of this concept for historical ontology of ourselves? A start is made by

considering Foucault’s definition of thought. “By ‘thought,’” he says, “I mean what

establishes, in a variety of possible forms [formes], the play of the true and false [le jeu

du vrai et du faux], and consequently constitutes the human being as a knowing subject”

(EW3 200/DE4 No 340, 580; my emphasis). Thought is, in other words, the determinable

and forms of experience are determinates of thought (hence, forms of thought), for

thought takes “concrete forms [aspects concrets]” through the mechanism of the play of

true and false (EW1 202/ DE4 No 340, 581). Foucault also connects experience to the

play of true and false in his concept of problematization. He says that it is according to

“games of truth [jeux de vérité],” or “the games of truth and error [jeux du vrai et du

faux],” that “being is historically constituted as experience; that is, as something that can

and must be thought” (HS 6-7/12-13). Here again we see the correlation of thought and

experience. Given that we already know that thought takes shape in forms of experience,

it is appropriate to infer that when Foucault says “experience” what he means is “forms

of experience”. This inference is justified by the fact that he qualifies the statement that

“being is historically constituted as experience” with the elucidation that being “can and

must be thought”. Rephrasing the passage, we can say that being can and must be

thought because it is historically constituted as forms of experience (or forms of thought),

where it is games of truth that render thought into concrete forms.

But what does it mean that being is historically constituted as forms of

experience, and that it can and must be constituted in this way? According to his own

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claims, Foucault restricts the scope of his ontology to include only “ourselves”. Given

this restrained scope, I would suggest that the reason he claims that being is historically

constituted as experience, and as that which must or “necessarily” be thought (HS2

11/17), is because he is speaking about the constitution of our being, human being, as an

object of experience and, therefore, an object for our thoughtful reflection. Put

differently, if our being must be thought, and given the identity between thought and

forms of experience, then our being is such that it is and must be put into concrete form.

Why must our being, our experience, be put into concrete form and reflected upon? We

can understand why Foucault construes this as an ontological ‘obligation,’ and get a

better sense for the relation between forms of experience and games of truth, if we cast it

in terms of his concept of problematization. Our being, our experience of ourselves,

presents itself to us as a problem, namely, What form does our being take and what form

should it take?53

53 There is an undeniable and memorable tone to Foucault’s concept of problematization. “Dasein,” Martin Heidegger says, “is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontologically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it” (Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 236).

This question arises not only from our existential predicament, but

because there is an entire practical dimension concerning our being – our conduct – that

is fundamentally related to the play of true and false. “My general theme isn’t society but

the discourse of true and false,” Foucault says, “by which I mean the correlative

formation of domains and objects and of the verifiable, falsifiable discourses that bear on

them; and it’s not just their formation that interests me, but the effects in the real to which

they are linked” (EW3 237/DE4 No 278, 33-4). And, “The history of ‘truth’ – of the

power proper to discourses accepted as true [discours acceptés comme vrais] – has yet to

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be written” (FL 215/DE3 No 200, 258).54

Problematization doesn’t mean the representation of a pre-existing object, nor the creation by discourse of an object that doesn’t exist. It is the totality of discursive and non-discursive practices that introduces something into the play of true and false [jeu du vrai et du faux] and constitutes it as an object of thought (whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.). (PPC 257/DE4 No 350, 670)

Put differently, Foucault is interested in not

merely how a domain, or a set of constraints for being ‘within the true,’ is established,

but how these domains come to impose themselves on individual conduct, or how the

truth is quite literally put into “play”. Consequently, Foucault says:

The analysis of the forms of experience is, firstly, an analysis of how through our

practices we problematize ourselves,55

I have just cast a form as ultimately about our conduct. To get a better sense of

what this means we need to get clear about the relation of forms of experience and games

of truth. Clearly, forms of experience and games of truth are conceptually bound. After

all, Foucault explains that study the historicity of the forms of experience is to study “the

play of the true and false [le jeu du vrai et du faux],” which “consequently constitutes the

and, secondly, how we form ourselves as subjects

in response to these problems and within the constraints imposed by play of the true and

false. In other words, we must think our being because our conduct, as autonomous

beings, is of principal concern. That is, the kinds of forms imposed upon and that we

impose upon ourselves matters because we are autonomous.

54 In the lectures “Society Must Be Defended”, Foucault says, “My problem is roughly this: What are the rules of right that power implements to produce discourses of truth? Or: What type of power is it that is capable of producing discourses of truth that have, in a society like ours, such powerful effects?” (Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, p. 24; Foucault, «Il faut défendre la société», p. 21-2). 55 Recall that Foucault defines a “problematization” as that “through which being offers itself to be, necessarily, thought – and the practices on the basis of which these problematizations are formed” (HS2 11/17).

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human being as a knowing subject” (EW3 200/DE4 No 340, 580). It is important here to

recall that Foucault’s definition of the subject is the self or the conception of selfhood a

person possesses. “There are two meanings of the world ‘subject’,” Foucault says,

“subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a

conscience or self-knowledge” (EW3 331/DE4 No 306, 227). It is through our immersion

in games of truth, I believe, that Foucault thinks we are tied to our identities or made into

subjects that experience ourselves in distinct ways, for the game of truth is a concept that

concerns the bearing of truth on conduct or what Foucault calls the “effect” or “power” of

truth in the real. To see this, we need to be clearer about the concept of games of truth.

The phrase “le jeu du vrai et du faux” is a phrase equivalent in meaning to jeux de vérité

or games of truth. Foucault defines a “game of truth” as “the rules [règles] according to

which what a subject can say about certain things depends on the question of true and

false” (EW2 460/DE4 No 345, 632; my emphasis), or “the forms [formes] according to

which discourses capable of being declared true or false are articulated concerning a

domain of things” (Ibid.; my emphasis). Elsewhere, he says:

The word ‘game’ [jeu] can lead you astray: when I say ‘game,’ I mean a set of rules [un ensemble de règles] by which truth is produced. It is not a game in the sense of an amusement; it is a set of procedures that lead to a certain result, which, on the basis of its principles and rules [règles] of procedure, may be considered valid or invalid, winning or losing. (EW1 297/DE4 No 356, 725; my emphases)

The first item of note in these definitions is the conception of a game of truth as a set of

“rules,” “forms,” or “principles”. I do not think that we should take the synonymy of

“rules” and “forms” (or even “principles”) loosely. Foucault identifies forms with rules

in this instance, and therefore it is plausible that we can use rules interchangeably with

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forms. This is further supported by the fact that in the essay “Foucault” he explains that a

history of thought is the analysis of the historicity of forms of experience, which is to

analyze constitution of the subject within the play of true and false. If the play of true

and false is the ensemble of rules by which ‘being within the true’ is established, then the

forms of experience are related in some substantial way with the rules of games of truth.

Thus, when Foucault says “play” or “games” we should see that what he is

articulating is that truth and falsity occur within a set of rules for making certain “valid or

invalid” statements and “winning or losing” moves or actions. Perhaps a more felicitous

representation of games of truth would be ‘games of acceptability,’ for the latter captures

his view better than “truth” does. Some commentators interpret Foucault’s many

statements about truth and games of truth as claims about the nature of truth.56 He

certainly suggests this when he says, “‘Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered

procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of

statements” (PK 133/DE3 No 192, 160). For reasons noted in Chapter One, I am highly

averse to reading Foucault in this way,57 and if he does make claims about the nature of

truth in writings prior to 1978, then I am committed to casting them aside.58

56 For example, see May, Between Genealogy and Epistemology; Prado, Starting with Foucault, Ch. 6; and Alcoff, Real Knowing, Chs. 4-5.

But we do

57 See Chapter One, Section 1.4. If Foucault is making claims about the nature of truth, then this obviously conflicts with his avoidance of engaging in an analytics of truth. 58 It would seem that the following statement is a rather strong one in support of such a view:

The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its régime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the

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not need to throw the baby out with the bath water, if, that is, we interpret him in light of

his use of Canguilhem’s distinction between the truth and being within the true. This is

certainly suggested by Foucault’s clarification of what he means when he says truth is a

“production”: “I repeat once again that by production of truth I mean not the production

of true utterances but the establishment of domains in which the practice [la pratique du

vrai et du faux] of true and false can be made at once ordered [réglée] and pertinent”

(EW3 230/DE4 No 278, 27). It seems to me that Foucault is more interested in what he

calls the “codifying effects regarding what is to be known [des effets de codification par

rapport à ce qui est à savoir]” rather than with the nature of either truth or knowledge

(EW3 225/DE4 No 278, 22). He is concerned with the “prescriptive effects” surrounding

truth (and knowledge) and how those effects came about (Ibid.). This is precisely the

sense at work in his notion of the rules of acceptability. He says, for example, that:

nothing can exist as an element of knowledge if, on the one hand, it does not conform to a set of rules and constraints characteristic, for example, of a given type of scientific discourse in a given period, and if, on the other hand, it does not possess the effects of coercion or simply the incentives peculiar to what is scientifically validated or simply rational or simply generally accepted, etc. (WC 61)

Hence, he explains that his analyses proceed from the “fact” of the acceptance of some

statement to the conditions of its acceptability. So, when Foucault speaks of truth as a

system or ensemble of rules, procedures, constraints, etc., what I believe he means is that

in order for a statement to be recognized as true, it must meet some minimal conditions

imposed upon statements from within discursive practices. This is not a view about truth

per se but a view about how and in what ways a statement is recognized as being a

acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (PK 131/DE3 No 192, 159)

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candidate for truth. Simply because a statement is accepted as true does not mean it is

true, but we need not think Foucault is saying that a statement is true simply because it is

widely or socially accepted. Foucault is more interested in the “policy” (OD 224/37) that

surrounds truth than he is in the truth. Thus, again, the principal issue for Foucault is

conduct, and the concept of games of truth points to the social constraints on conduct

(particularly discursive conduct).

How does the ensemble of rules or forms for conduct constitute our experience?

Foucault indicates three “axes” of analysis that are essentially three domains of

determining how our experience is formed. In each case, our experience takes place

within the normative framework of the rules of games of truth or rules of acceptability. I

would suggest, then, that these are the forms of experience: the historically variable rules

that guide conduct and create subjects by tying them to an identity through social

coercion. Representing forms of experience in this way is suggested in Foucault’s

statement that “the relative importance of these three axes is not always the same for all

forms of experience” (EW1 202/DE4 No 340, 581). As I see this passage, Foucault

analyzes three kinds of forms for the formation of experience, each of which is related to

our conduct. These forms of experience are themselves populated by individual forms or

types, terms that Foucault uses interchangeably. These super forms are what Foucault

refers to as “systems,” “Systems of thought are forms [formes] in which, during a given

period of time, the knowledges individualize, achieve an equilibrium, and enter into

communication” (EW1 9/DE1 No 71, 846; my emphasis). The forms of thought are the

systems of thought, and the forms of experience are therefore systems of experience. But

given that Foucault equates rules and forms, a system of thought is a codified or

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‘equilibrated’ set of rules. There are, I would suggest, three primary kinds of forms of

experience.

Firstly, there are “types of understanding,” which concern the constratins on

statements in discursive practices. These rules possess a bearing on our experience since

there are a number of discursive practices that explore, and make claims about, different

objects of experience, meaning the different ways in which we are given to ourselves as

objects of experience. The idea is that how we experience madness, disease, criminality,

and other aspects of being human is dependent on the rules of appropriate (and

inappropriate) conduct within discursive practices. For this reason Foucault will say that

he is not interested in just any games of truth, but only those in which the human being is

an object of knowledge (EW2 460/DE4 No 345, 632-3). Secondly, there are “types of

normality,” which is an axis that concerns “the relation to rules”. It is in relation to this

form of experience, I think, that Foucault has the most to say. He is most interested in

the communication between practices, most notably the relays between discursive

practices that take human beings as objects of knowledge and how the rules of these

discursive practices impose themselves on our conduct. That his work is centered

primarily on the relations between rules of discourse and their effects on conduct is

evidenced in his claim that he studies

the ensemble of more or less regulated, more or less deliberate, more or less finalized ways of doing things, through which can be seen both what was constituted as real for those who sought to think it and manage it and the way in which the latter constituted themselves as subjects capable of knowing, analyzing, and ultimately altering reality. These are the ‘practices,’ understood as a way of acting and thinking at once, that provide the intelligibility key for the correlative constitution of the subject and object. (EW2 463/DE4 No 345, 634-5)

Another passage is crucial:

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If I have studied ‘practices’ such as those of the sequestration of the insane, or clinical medicine, or the organization of the empirical sciences, or legal punishment, it was in order to study this play [jeu] between a “code” that governs ways of doing things […] and a production of true discourses that served to found, justify, and provide reasons and principle for these ways of doing things. (EW3 230/DE4 No 278, 26-7; translation modified)

Practices themselves are not the forms of experience, although they are indispensable,

Foucault thinks, for the constitution of ourselves as subject.59

All of this is relevant to the third form of experience, “the modes of relation to

oneself and others” (EW1 202/DE4 No 340, 581) or “the forms of relation to the self

[formes du rapport à soi]” (EW1 204/DE4 No 340, 583). Foucault studied this third

form of experience largely independently of his prior interests in the modern confluence

of rules of acceptability and the practices in which they are deployed to govern

Practices are the activities

in which what is accepted as true is deployed to govern our conduct, and it is through

practices that we are tied to our identities. By studying stable formations of practices –

“the ensemble of more or less regulated, more or less deliberate, more or less finalized

ways of doing things” – one can arrive at the forms of experience for a period of time, or

the historical rules by which individuals are conducted and according to which they

conduct themselves.

59 Djaballah, Kant, Foucault, and Forms of Experience, Ch. 4, argues precisely the opposite, claiming that Foucault thinks practices just are forms of experience. In a certain sense, this is true, insofar as practices are goal-directed activities that are socially regulated according to rules or norms. That is, as rule-based, one might argue on my picture that practices are a kind of form or set of forms. Djaballah reads practices in a more robustly Kantian manner than I do, claiming that practices comprise the receptive and spontaneous dimension of Foucault’s concept of experience. While his view is too complicated to treat here, Djaballah reads Foucault primarily in light of his early works, whereas I read Foucault almost exclusively in light of his later works. Apart from obvious disagreements this would produce (given my arguments in Chapter One, Section 1.4, and above in Section 3.3), Djaballah lifts the concept of forms of experience from Foucault’s later philosophy without treating it in terms of Foucault’s later philosophy. This is a massive mistake for his analysis, as it causes him to miss the fact that Foucault sees practices as objects of analysis because that is where games of truth and conduct come into contact. It is this intersection that Djaballah ignores.

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individuals.60 However, we know from the analysis in Chapter One of “What is

Critique?” and “What is Enlightenment?” that the relation one has to oneself and others is

of vital importance for Foucault, for it concerns how we conduct ourselves according to

principles. As Foucault notes, not each of these three forms is going to be proportional to

the others. In fact, the uniqueness of the modern forms of experience is that the relation

between rules of acceptability for knowledge and their influence on our conduct is

particularly pronounced. The ancients enjoyed less regulation of their personal conduct

because their practices were not yet under modern governmentality. There was

government of individual conduct, no doubt, but not in the sense that Foucault sees it, as

penetrating our conduct and sense of selves through the disciplines.61

The point of this final section is to show that the conceptual apparatus at the heart

of Foucault’s methodologies, notably his archaeological method, is modeled on Kant’s

Transcendental Analytic. There are obvious differences between them that are not worth

belaboring, for my claim is not that Foucault’s historical ontology is identical to Kant’s

Analytic, but rather only in important respects. The purpose is to show that Foucault, like

Kant, conceives experience as fundamentally composed of rules (or forms) and that those

rules are both enabling and limiting, where the larger purpose is to use this insight to

undermine the plausibility of the phenomenological account of Foucault’s methodologies.

There is already good evidence that Foucault conceives of his project in a Kantian way,

and this section attempts to put a bit more meat on those bones. In the first case, it is

clear that Foucault understands that experience is fundamentally comprised of rules for

60 HS2 and the third volume of The History of Sexuality concern ancient ethics. For the latter, see Foucault, The Care of the Self (Le souci de soi ). 61 See McGushin, Foucault’s Askēsis, Ch. 8.

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guiding conduct, just as Kant represents thought discursively in terms of the categories

and as requiring concepts, which he understands as rules for unifying experience. The

forms of experience for Foucault are unities in a similar sense, insofar as they are

binding, but not universally and necessarily so. With regard to the second point, the rules

of experience are enabling because it is through those rules that subjects are constituted

as objects of their own experience. For Foucault, this means that subjects are tied to a

self-conception, an identity, which means they experience themselves as particular kinds

of beings. The mechanism that produces subjects or that ties human beings to

conceptions of themselves are the practices in which they conduct themselves and the

rules that individuals in those practices obey. Foucault believes that through practices we

are both conducted and conduct ourselves, which means we are tied to conceptions of

ourselves and we tie ourselves to those conceptions. It is in this sense that rules are

enabling, for they are conditions of the possibility of possessing a self-knowledge or of

being a subject. This also means, however, that the rules of practices are constraining or

that they institute limits. One is made capable of representing oneself as a certain kind of

being by engaging in practices; however, one is also bound or limited to representing

oneself as a certain kind of being by engaging in practices.62

Consequently, while it is not necessarily a mistake to represent aspects of

Foucault’s methodology in phenomenological terms, the kind of interpretation that

62 For example, despite engaging in a religious practice in which the truth of the individual is found in the activities of a soul, the Western world binds that individual to a conception of herself as a being with a specific psychology and according to psychological norms. This is not to say that these views of the human being conflict; rather, it is to point out that while the former is a choice, the latter is not. Psychology is accepted as making true claims about human beings and therefore it possesses a kind of authority in our practices, such as in evaluating student and job performance, as expert criminal testimony, or as the day time talking head authority on human behavior.

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Thompson promotes fails to capture the full extent of the Kantian conceived ontology at

work in Foucault’s thought. When he explains that his critical philosophy is a reflection

on limits, he means limits in the Kantian sense, which means as at once conditions of

possibility and constraints on conduct. He even goes as far as to describe these

conditions as Kant does, that is, as rules for rendering a unity of experience, or a form.

Where Kant is concerned with discovering the rules for the possibility of any experience,

Foucault is concerned with the histories of the rules that provide the form for the

experience of ourselves. It seems to me that this conceptual architecture at the heart of

Foucault’s methodologies is better represented as Kantian than phenomenological.

3.6 Conclusion

In this chapter I set-up a dispute that has only recently taken place. Kevin

Thompson provides what he believes is the correct interpretation of Foucault’s

archaeological method. For him, one must interpret that method in light of Foucault’s

roots in the tradition of transcendental phenomenology, notably Jean Cavaillès critique of

the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, which means that Foucaultian archaeology is a

form of historical and yet transcendental philosophy. As a result, Thompson claims,

Foucault is engaged in a form of historical eidetic description. I then presented and

buttressed Colin Koopman’s critique of this phenomenological reading. The most

important of these criticisms is that the phenomenological interpretation fails to

adequately account for Foucault’s ultimate and straightforward refusal to admit that

archaeology is a form of transcendental philosophy. In detailing Thompson’s response,

however, we saw that Koopman cannot account for Foucault’s transcendental

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terminology, and this put us in the strange position of knowing Thompson’s view is false

and yet better capable of handling Foucault’s actual texts. So, I proceeded to argue that

the conceptual architecture at the heart of Foucault’s philosophy is indebted not to

transcendental phenomenology but Kantian transcendental critique. And while there are

obvious differences between Foucaultian historical critique and Kantian transcendental

critique, the similarities are significant enough that the phenomenological interpretation

is left without any substantial support.

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VITA

Robert M. Robinson

I. Education Ph.D. Purdue University, Philosophy August 2010

M.A. Loyola Marymount University, Philosophy May 2005

B.A. Azusa Pacific University, Philosophy May 2003 Area of Specialization

19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy

Areas of Competence Kant, Ethics, History of Philosophy (esp. Modern), Philosophy of Religion Dissertation

Title: A Critical Ontology of Ourselves: The Kantian Foundations of Michel Foucault’s Philosophy

Committee: Daniel Smith (Chair), William McBride, Patrick Kain, Brad Elliott Stone

II. Academic Appointments Visiting Assistant Professor, Loyola Marymount University (Fall 2010- )

III. Presentations and Conference Work Peer-Reviewed Conference Presentations

“The Alleged Paradox of Kant’s Concept of Self-Legislation and the Requirements of the Rational Will,” The 47th Annual Meeting of the Alabama Philosophical Society, 2-3 October 2009

“Accessing the Archive: The Problem of Archaeology for Foucault’s Critical Ontology,” The 8th Annual Meeting of the Foucault Circle, 15-17 February 2008

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“Defending Levinas: Representation, Intentionality, Justice,” Loyola University Chicago Graduate Student Conference, 18-20 May 2005

“Thinking at the Frontiers: Foucault’s Philosophical Ethos,” University of Memphis Graduate Student Philosophy Conference, 28-29 January 2005

Invited Presentations

“Kierkegaard, Foucault and the Christian Ethics of Freedom,” Presentation to the Undergraduate Philosophy Club at Oral Roberts University, 13-14 March 2007

“Phenomenology and Religion,” Presentation to the Azusa Pacific University Undergraduate Philosophy Club, 21 February 2004

Conference Work

Moderator of the Session, “Substituting the Ego for the Other,” North American Levinas Society, Purdue University, 13-15 May 2006

Conference Co-organizer with Dr. Brian Treanor, Loyola Marymount University Philosophy Conference, “Imaging God: Religion and Cinema,” 26 February 2005

IV. Fellowships, Grants, and Honors

Purdue University Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship, Philosophy Department Faculty Nominee, 2009-2010

Purdue University Teaching Assistantship, 2005–2009

American Academy of Religion Grant for conference organization. Co-Recipient with Dr. Brian Treanor, Loyola Marymount University, June 2004 ($500)

Loyola Marymount University Teaching Fellowship, 2003-2004

V. Teaching Experience Purdue University

Instructor with full responsibilities:

Introduction to Philosophy Fall of 2007 & 2008 Ethics Spring of 2007, 2008, & 2009 Religions of the West Summer of 2007

Teaching Assistant:

Introduction to Philosophy Fall of 2006 (M. Curd, Instructor) Philosophy of Religion Spring of 2006 (M. Bergmann, Instructor)

Ethics Fall of 2005 (P. Kain, Instructor)

192

Loyola Marymount University

Instructor with full responsibilities:

Critical Thinking Fall of 2004

VI. Professional Service and Development Purdue University Philosophy Department Graduate Student Representative, 2006-2008 Teacher Orientation and Practicum (TOP), Loyola Marymount University, Spring and Fall 2004

VII. Professional Affiliations American Philosophical Association

Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy

VIII. Languages French (reading)

IX. Dissertation Abstract See page ix above.

X. List of Graduate Coursework Ancient and Medieval Philosophy

• Aquinas’ Summa contra Gentiles C. Kazcor, Loyola Marymount, Fall 2003 • Plato M. Morelli, Loyola Marymount, Fall 2004 • Aristotle’s Metaphysics P. Curd, Purdue University, Spring 2006

Modern Philosophy

• Kant’s Aesthetics J. Wilson, Loyola Marymount, Spring 2004 • Hegel M. Morelli, Loyola Marymount, Spring 2004 • Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason J. Wilson, Loyola Marymount, Fall 2004 • Kant’s Ethical Theory P. Kain, Purdue University, Fall 2006 • The Metaphysics of J. Cover, Purdue University, Fall 2006

Descartes & Malebranche

193

19th & 20 th Century Continental Philosophy

• Kierkegaard E. Murray, Loyola Marymount, Spring 2004 • Foucault B. Stone, Loyola Marymount, Fall 2003 • Levinas B. Treanor, Loyola Marymount, Fall 2003 • Heidegger B. Stone, Loyola Marymount, Spring 2005 • Phenomenology: Husserl, D. Smith, Purdue University, Fall 2005

Heidegger, & Merleau-Ponty • Deleuze D. Smith, Purdue University, Spring 2006 • Existentialism: Kierkegaard, W. McBride, Purdue University, Spring 2007

Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre & Beauvoir

• Post-Secular Phenomenology: M. Matuštík, Purdue University, Spring 2007 Heidegger, Marion, & Derrida

Anglo-American Philosophy and Logic

• Pragmatism: Peirce & James B. Treanor, Loyola Marymount, Spring 2005 • Contemporary Ethical Theory P. Kain, Purdue University, Fall 2005 • Philosophy of Language R. Bertolet, Purdue University, Fall 2005 • Logical Positivism & Wittgenstein C. Pincock, Purdue University, Spring 2006 • Symbolic Logic T. Ulrich, Purdue University, Fall 2006

XI. References

Dr. Daniel Smith Purdue University ([email protected]) Dr. William McBride Purdue University ([email protected]) Dr. Patrick Kain Purdue University ([email protected]) Dr. Brad Elliott Stone Loyola Marymount University ([email protected])

tphd-a critical ontology of ourselves- the kantian foundations of michel foucault's philosophy

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