Kant
and Foucault
Part
I: Kant’s critique of the dogmatic slumber.
As Foucault tried to critique the anthropological slumber of his times, which
he ascribes to a certain form of neo-Kantianism that poses man and finitude at
the centre as well as the margins of all positivities of knowledge, Kant was
engaged in a monumental attempt at providing an alternative mode of thinking to
that which suffered from dogmatism in his time, i.e. the philosophy of
substance. Yet, Foucault recognises in Kant the potential for questioning the
anthropological slumber he sets out to critique. In fact, Foucault’s critique
of the subject shares in the language and conceptual elements of Kant’s
critique of René Descartes. It is in this tension that we would like to insert
our reflections on the meaning of anthropology today. To accomplish this task it
will be necessary to look into Kant’s Copernican revolution in some detail,
for we believe that Kant’s conceptual categories will lie in the background of
a large part of Foucault’s work.
[...]
When
Foucault talks of aesthetics of existence, we cannot help reading into it a
recuperation of the role of sensation and the body in the problem of knowledge.
The main issue for our purposes for now is to register the importance of a
notion of experience that in Foucault is essentially transformative rather than
logical, (we will dwell on the importance of this in Part II when exploring his
genealogical reconstruction of the separation between philosophy and
spirituality).
[...]
The
dialectics shows that human knowledge is limited by experience, but also that
its natural tendency to move beyond it cannot be stopped. The insistence on the
necessity of being vigilant against these tendencies will be interpreted by
Foucault as an awareness of the precarious equilibrium on which the system of
knowledge is built in Kant, being as it is dependent on faculties of relating
that can easily deceive.
However,
for Kant, there is a logic to the error man commits when going beyond
experience, and in fact, the last section of the Critique is devoted to
the examination of these errors and to ways to discipline the excesses of
reason. Hence, dialectics for Kant includes both the study and critique of
transcendental illusions. For Foucault this element of Kant’s philosophy
posits finitude as the basis of epistemological activity. As he puts it:
When
Descartes says: philosophy is sufficient to itself only for knowledge, and
Kant completes by saying: if knowledge has limits, they are all comprised in
the structure of the knowing subject - in other words, in the very thing
that permits knowledge - the link between accessing truth and the exigency
of a transformation of the subject and its being by itself is definitely
broken.
However,
the view of Reason as structurally tending towards illusion often comes close
in definition to Foucault’s notion and study of the rationalité
of given historical periods that structurally determines their grille of intelligibility.
Arguably, Foucault critically transposes the problems identified by Kant in
the activity of the knowing subject onto a plane of exteriority where the determining
role of Time and modes of self affection reappear in the context of a critique
of the alleged autonomy of epistemology from ontology.
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Chapter
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of Contents
Another thinker who has dwelled on the role of aesthetics in the present is
Antonio Negri in Fabbriche del Soggetto, Bimestrale di politica e
cultura, 1987. For Negri, a transcendental aesthetics today is neglected in
favour of an analytics of a constitutive power and a negative dialectics of
crisis and illusion. ‘For Benjamin and Adorno, Bloch and Lukács, the
feeling of crisis was an exasperated declaration of impotence. But if human
freedom is the foundation, knowledge cannot but present itself as ethics and
constitution. […] How could the ground of our philosophical culture –
the dialectics of German idealism- repeat the atrocious unfolding of the Dialektik
der Aufklärung?
Why was the immediacy of a new and powerful transcendental aesthetics,
rather than moved towards the sphere of the imagination, why was it subsumed
instead to the mediation of a transcendental analytics and to such
artificial prison of the desire for constitution?’, p. 31 (my
translation). Negri inserts his recuperation of a transcendental aesthetics
in a vehement critique of two trends which he accuses of indifference to the
real. For Negri, ‘an analytical sphere of knowledge that has turned into
the abstract realm of communication is parallel to a mode of production that
is increasingly reliant on communication and information, whilst remaining
self-referential and tautological.’, ibid., p. 44