Humanism and Anthropology.

It may be part of the destiny of Western philosophy that, since the 19^th century, something like an anthropology became possible; when I say ‘anthropology’ I am not referring to the particular science called anthropology, which is the study of cultures exterior to our own; by ‘anthropology’ I mean the strictly philosophical structure responsible for the fact that the problems of philosophy are now all lodged within the domain that can be called that of human finitude. If one can no longer philosophise about anything but man in so far as he is a Homo natura, or insofar as he is a finite being, to that extent isn’t every philosophy at bottom an anthropology?[1]

Foucault begins by questioning the role of anthropology in philosophical thinking and its status with respect to psychology. In his Commentaire of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Foucault already sets out a highly philosophical analysis of Kant’s own difficulties in positioning anthropological study within an epistemologically coherent system of understanding. His preoccupation with anthropology and the possibility of such science as well as its relations to philosophy and psychology are clear from the outset. We are more familiar with the declaration of the death of man in The Order of Things. However, in the previous and largely unpublished works one can see the extent to which the development of a preoccupation with the possibility of alternatives to humanist man-centred epistemic structures already points towards an attempt at constituting a positive ontology of concrete existence, in the form of a rendering of Kant’s anthropological question: ‘What does man make of himself?’.

In 1954 Foucault published Maladie mentale et personnalité and L’Introduction to the French edition of Ludwig Binswanger’s Traum und Existenz. Maladie mentale et personnalité aims to show that ‘the root of mental pathology should not be searched in a speculation on some metapathology, but only in a reflection on man himself’.[2] In this work, the reflection on man’s being is taken to be the methodological premise of the definition of mental illness. The attempt at founding a rigorous science of mental illness is developed through references to historical materialism. Foucault’s intervention in the debate on alienation and humanism in this work takes the form of a critique of positivism and determinism, as well as Freudianism. In the fifth chapter, initially entitled ‘The historical meaning of alienation’, Foucault sustains that alienation arises out of and is the product of the interaction of man with his environment, particularly in the context of the conflictual nature of existing in social relations and the specificity of the individual’s response to such situation of conflict.[3] More specifically, in the analysis of alienation, Foucault criticises Freud’s recourse to a past that reactivates itself in the individual by positing mental illness as a response to a conflict in the present. As he puts it: ‘Pathology is a diffused defence reaction’[4], that occurs when the ‘individual cannot master (maîtriser), at the level of his reactions, the contradictions of his environment, when the psychological dialectic of the individual cannot recognise itself in the dialectics of the conditions of his existence’[5]. We can see a reiteration, in his critical interpretation of psychoanalysis, of the Kantian anthropological preoccupation with what man makes of himself. Foucault interestingly adopts a sort of ‘transformative method’ familiar to Feuerbachian Marxism, and with all its rhetorical force he applies it onto Freud and psychoanalysis.[6] He claims that in his reflection on the neurosis of the war, Freud developed the notion of an opposition between a life instinct, reminiscent of the old bourgeois optimism of the 19^th century, and a death instinct. Foucault then proceeds to deconstruct this notion by regarding the opposition as evidence of the contradictions that characterised European society at the beginning of the century, rather than as an original psychological scenario to ascribe to man, thereby defining Freudianism as the supreme stage of subconscious theorisation of capitalism: ‘Freud wanted to explain war, they say; but it is war that explains this turn in Freudian thought’.[7]

According to Foucault, materialism ought to avoid two potential errors: on the one hand, the identification of psychological conflict with the existing contradictions of the environment, which would equate mental with social alienation; on the other hand, the reduction of each pathology to a malfunctioning of the nervous system, whose mechanism should in principle be analysed purely from the physiological point of view[8]. According to Foucault, a materialist standpoint is capable of recognising the reality and specific dimensions of illness. Therapy ought to aim at establishing ‘new relations with the environment’ and, like all human sciences, psychology ought to strive towards the end of human alienation.[9]

In the same period, Foucault also writes the introduction to the work of an Austrian existentialist psychoanalyst, Ludwig Binswanger.[10] This introduction is emblematic of a deeper reflection on the status of psychoanalysis with respect to philosophy, not so much on the status of scientificity of the former, which will be the core concern of his later Madness and Civilisation, but more particularly on the relation of the study of man and the ontology of existence. For this reason it is an important contribution to our understanding of Foucault’s reading of Kant in the context of his preoccupation with anthropological thought. In his words:

These introductory pages do not intend, as it is paradoxically customary in prefaces, to follow the path traced by Binswanger in Traum und Existenz. Perhaps the difficulty of the text might lead one to do so, but it is so essential to the reflection developed here that it cannot be watered down by the zealous advise ad usum delphini, even though the 'psychologist' is always a non specialist in the field of reflection. The original forms of thought introduce themselves: their history is the only exegesis they tolerate, their destiny their only critical form.

However, this is not a history we will attempt to decipher. A later work will seek to locate existentialist analysis within the development of the contemporary reflection on man. Today, these introductory remarks have one objective: to present a form of analysis that is not projected as a philosophy and does not have the effect of being a psychology; a form of analysis that reveals itself as being fundamental in relation to concrete, experimental and objective knowledge; finally, its principle and method are determined from the outset only by the absolute privilege of the object of their inquiry: man, or rather, being-man, Menschsein. In this way one can circumscribe the whole basis of anthropology.[11]

  In this work it is already evident that the relationship established between anthropology and psychology is of crucial importance for Foucault. As we shall see in the analysis of his Commentaire of Kant’s Anthropology, Foucault takes up and reiterates Kant’s questioning of the (im-)possibility of rational psychology as a science. Implicit in this philosophical exegesis is on the one hand the attempt to question, with Kant, the status of the I as substance, which will be later referred to as the Cartesian subject, whilst on the other hand to show the fallacies of a treatment of man’s being as a purely physiological question. As Rudi Visker comments, ‘psychology can only legitimate its own scientificity by reducing history to the overcoming of an inertia, which keeps an already original present, but misrecognized object under the sway of a pre-scientific knowledge’.[12] Foucault sees Binswanger’s project and its positing of Menschsein as the object of enquiry as setting itself up against psychological positivism ‘that claims to exhaust the signifying content of man in the reductive concept of homo natura.’ According to Foucault, Binswanger’s merit is that of reintroducing man’s being in an ontological reflection on existence.

Clearly such an anthropology can only assert its rights by showing how an analysis of being-man can be articulated on an analytics of existence: a problem of foundation that must define, in the latter, the conditions of possibility of the former; a problem of justification that must bring to light the proper dimensions and the autochthon meaning of anthropology. One can provisionally say, whilst open to possible revisions, that being-man (Menschsein) is the effective and concrete content of what ontology analyzes as the transcendental structure of Dasein, of being-there.[13]

Foucault here needs to introduce an ontology of man that can account for concrete existence beyond the physiological, whilst keeping with a method that is capable of inducing and deriving an ontology from the reality of man’s being in the world. As we shall later analyse, this is also the core of Kant’s conception in the anthropological analysis of man as citizen of the world which Foucault will extensively draw on in reconfiguring the project of philosophical critique within the worldliness of language exchange. 

Referring to anthropology, Foucault writes that ‘its original opposition to a science of human facts that proceeds following the methods of positive knowledge, experimental analysis and naturalistic reflection, does not lead to an a priori form of philosophical speculation. Its research theme is that of the human “fact”, if by “fact” we do not mean a definite objective part of a natural universe, but the real content of an existence that lives, experiments itself, recognises itself or loses itself in a world that is at once the whole of its project and the “element” in which its reality is given.’[14]

Foucault aims to underline the dynamic element introduced into any ontological reflection by the anthropological analysis of concrete forms of existence. This is also what sustains his critical rendering of Kant’s anthropological reflections in relation to the first Critique. In our view, the question posed by Foucault and Kant alike is the following: what constitutes the object of an anthropology that avoids the positivist fallacy of a physiological study of man as well as the rendering of man as the centripetal force at the centre of all possible knowledge of the world?

Anthropology can therefore be defined as a ‘science of facts’ in so far as it rigorously develops the existential content of being there. To immediately reject it because it is neither philosophy nor psychology, nor can it be defined as science, or speculation, because it does not proceed as a positive knowledge, nor is it the content of a priori knowledge, means to ignore the original meaning of its project. It seemed to us worth following, for an instant, the path of this reflection in order to ascertain whether the reality of man can only be accessible beyond a distinction between psychology and philosophy; whether man in its forms of existence represents the only way to get to man.[15]

In this introduction, Foucault is very explicit on the role of anthropology for an ontology of man. He sees anthropology, the study of man and its modes of being in the world, as propedeutic to any reflection on the nature of being and existence as such. By criticising the a priori separation of anthropology and ontology he is asserting the primacy of a movement of reflection on the concrete.[16]

Within the contemporary anthropological paradigm, Binswanger’s procedure seemed to follow the most important lead. It indirectly goes through the problem of ontology and anthropology, pointing directly towards concrete existence, its development and historical content. Starting from there and through the analysis of structures of existence- individuated existence, which has a proper name and lives a precise history- there is a continuous going back and forth from anthropological forms to ontological conditions of existence and vice versa. For Binswanger, the borderline that seems too difficult to trace between anthropological forms and ontological conditions of existence is continuously overcome by concrete existence, in which the real limit of Menschsein and of Dasein is evident.[17]

Foucault’s notion of practices of the self will later delineate more clearly the concern with concrete existence and its role in relation to philosophical reflection. It is from a historical study of concrete existence and the archival research carried out on the epistemic configuring role of practices of power relations that characterises Foucault’s work Les Anormaux.[18] Les Anormaux opens with a literary overview of ‘dangerous individuals’ in criminal records of the 18^th century.  An impressive accumulation of resources and research material, this work is close for its irony and exposition to what Foucault worked on with a team of researcher, Parallel Lives.[19] He often remarks the sub-literary character of the records whilst underlying their actualité. The records are interesting in themselves: they are reports of trial processes for charges of murder and minor illegalities committed by ‘dangerous individuals’: a glimpse at the formation of discursive practices on ‘perverse adults’, ‘hysterical women’ and ‘masturbating children’. One of the focuses of the analysis is the way in which state power establishes a relation of continuity in the application of the law with the medical establishment. In the reported records judges call upon doctors to certify that the whole behaviour of a person who committed a crime is to be regarded as dangerous, thereby justifying the process of confinement from society. The crucial ‘improvement’ in the coordinated operation of the legal and medical apparatus is that what comes to be under judgement is the whole subjectivity of the person committing a crime, where by subjectivity we mean an individuated set of practices of concrete existence.

  The idea of dangerousness meant that the individual must be considered by society at the level of his potentialities, and not at the level of his actions; not at the level of the actual violations of an actual law, but at the level of the behavioural potentialities they represented.[20]

Therefore, it is no longer the criminal action to be under the scrutiny of the law, but a whole set of known social practices and behaviours ascribed to the ‘criminal’ that come to be judged as dangerous and potentially detrimental to social peace. Under this category of course are listed numerous actions that are more indicative of the moral, medical and legal discourse of the period than anything else; such as the role of religion and blasphemy in the social imaginary, the sexual attitudes promoted and silenced as well as the general standards of sociability and involvement in the community. In other words, the concrete practices of man in the world become the object of regulation and government.

  This new knowledge was no longer organised around the question: ‘Was this done? Who did it?’ It was no longer organised in terms of presence and absence, of existence and non existence; it was organised around the norm, in terms of what was normal or not, correct or not, in terms of what one must do or not do. This examination was the basis of the power, the form of knowledge-power, that was to give rise not, as in the case of the inquiry, to the great sciences of observation, but to what we call the ‘human sciences’ – psychiatry, psychology, sociology.[21]

As we have seen, the earlier preoccupation with the role of concrete existence here takes as its main focus the genealogical mapping of relations of power that arise out of the intertwining of medical practices with the legal apparatus. As Foucault often highlights, the relation of medical and legal practices is crucial to our understanding of power relations. His studies and genealogies of criminal and medical knowledge converge on a strong critical stance against received habits of designating and seek to unravel at the level of the ‘unconscious of knowledge’ the framing of the self-evident, in other words, the workings of morality both at the level of interiorised practices and the habitual re-enactment of domination intrinsic to the ontological repetition of being. With reference to the identification of hysteria and hypochondria as mental diseases, which at a certain point sanctions the mode in which madness arises in the moment when ‘the mind becomes blind through the very excess of sensibility’,[22] Foucault points out how madness acquires ‘a new content of guilt, a moral sanction of just punishment’.[23]

  Instead of making blindness the condition of possibility for all the manifestations of madness, it describes blindness, the blindness of madness, as the psychological effect of a moral fault. And thereby compromises what had been essential in the experience of unreason. What had been blindness would become unconsciousness, what had been error would become fault, and everything in madness that designated the paradoxical manifestation of non-being would become the natural punishment of a moral evil. In short, the whole vertical hierarchy which constituted the structure of classical madness, from the cycle of material causes to the transcendence of delirium, would now collapse and spread over the surface of a domain which psychology and morality would soon occupy together and contest with each other. The ‘scientific psychiatry’ of the 19^th century became possible. It was in these ‘diseases of the nerves’ and in these ‘hysterias’, which would soon provoke its irony, that this psychiatry took its origin.[24]  

Foucault’s task goes beyond proving the unscientificity of any given science.[25] In Genealogy as Critique, Rudi Visker makes a point of showing Foucault’s genealogy to be incomplete from the point of view of radical critique, ‘If we were able to explain what was the decisive motive for psychology to develop -on more than merely random grounds- precisely this particular self-understanding as a science, then he might possess the means to shield a potential critique of that self-understanding from the charge of arbitrariness.’

  For Visker, the idea that the emergence of the historical reality of madness represents a degeneration or alienation provides a counterpoint to a basically genealogical analysis of an éclairage en retour.[26] As he puts it: ‘Historically, the object which psychology claims to discover not only arose conjointly with this discovery but this discovery also functions as a concealment of the real object, la folie; it is based on a de facto alienation which is avoidable de jure: mental illness is alienated madness.’

We do not think this reading fully captures Foucault’s opposition to essentializing trends in anthropology. The accent posed on the effects of truth is more geared to point towards a critique of the philosophy of origins or consciousness, as well as the formalising tendencies of the human sciences, which, as we shall later see, is fully explicated in his treatment of modern anthropology in the Commentaire. We read Foucault’s genealogies as the realisation of an ambition expressed in the Introduction to Binswanger’s Traum und Existenz, namely one that aims to rethink anthropology and ontology through a reflection on concrete forms of life, and their articulation, possibilities and limits in different historical moments, yet with an objective that is that of striking at the heart of the present and questioning the existing frontiers of possible knowledge and transformation. To read Foucault’s work outside of the demands of an ontology of the present, in search for an analytics of truth, would no doubt diminish its import and freeze it in a-temporal theoretical constraints that might leave us with a whole body of historical data and theoretical opinions of little internal autonomous coherence.