Part
III. What is it to reason? From sapere
aude to mutare aude
We have argued that after Kant
modernity ceases to have a relation with the past in counter posing terms thus
ceasing the classical dispute between ancients and modern. The present as
modernity begins to relate to itself. Philosophical exercise becomes
preliminarily determined by the choice to think for oneself, sapere aude,
as an invitation to belong to one’s own time and actualité. Minority
is defined by Kant as a situation of authority whereby one is guided in one’s
thoughts by someone else. The exit from this kind of minority requires a
moral-political attitude precisely because it entails a questioning of authority
and its rejection. Foucault’s association of critique with ‘the art of not
being governed, like this and at this price’ (l’art de n’être pas tellement gouverné) aims to capture the
Kantian motto.
Kant’s sapere aude is a call to dare not to be governed in the usage of
reason, when this is public, when one speaks as a world citizen. This public use
of reason is the cosmic
use of reason, which Kant distinguished from the scholastic,
and it is related to wisdom rather than functional ability.
The
mightiest revolution coming from inside of man is his departure from his
self-incurred tutelage. Instead of letting others think for him, while he was
merely imitating or allowing himself to be guided by others, he now dares to
proceed, though still shakily, with his own feet upon the ground of
experience.
Foucault recuperates the
notion of thinking for oneself and shows how this is inextricably linked to a
practical modification in one’s relation to oneself, consisting in se déprendre
de soi-même.
To detach oneself from oneself is an activity carried out through the very
process of reasoning. In this it is close to Kant’s notion of critique in so
far as it aims at investigating the frontiers of the division between the
knowable from the unknowable.
Freedom is never ethics if it
conceives of itself as the effect of the elimination of codes and dislocation of
rules: this is why the distinction between processes of liberation and practices
of freedom acquires an important significance. The ethical dimension is
encountered only in the practice of the problematisation of freedom and in the
constant exercise of giving shape and form to one’s existence, of making it a
work of art, as the invitation to an aesthetics of existence suggests.
Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power has
been compared to Weber’s description of the mechanisms of domination at play
in capitalist rationality.
The main point of difference Foucault claims
with respect to Weber is that he is not working through ideal types, nor writing
a history of rationalisation per se, with any ‘anthropological’ invariable.
Foucault’s genealogies take rationalities as the operative framework of
discursive practices.
No
given form of rationality is actually reason. […]
I do not speak of the point at which reason became instrumental. At
present, for example, I am studying the problem of techniques of the self in
Greek and Roman antiquity; how man, human life, and the self were all objects of
a certain number of tekhnai that, with their exacting rationality, could
well be compared to any technique of production.
But let us look into Kant’s notion of Reason. Kant recognises reason in its generic connotation
as the knowing faculty; however, he also provides it with a specific meaning in
the dialectic, which will become very popular during Romanticism. For Kant,
reason is both a logical and a transcendental faculty. As a logical faculty, it
produces so-called mediated conclusions through abstractions; as a
transcendental faculty, it creates conceptions and contains a priori
cognitions whose object cannot be given empirically.
The
transcendental concept of reason is, therefore, none other than the concept of
the totality of the
conditions for any given conditioned. Now since it is the unconditioned
alone which makes possible the totality of conditions and, conversely, the
totality of conditions is always itself unconditioned, a pure concept of reason
can in general be explained by the concept of the unconditioned, conceived as
containing a ground of the synthesis of the conditioned.
For Kant, reason is different
from understanding in this respect: ‘In the first part of our transcendental
logic, we treated the understanding as being the faculty of rules; reason we
shall here distinguish from understanding by entitling it the faculty of principles.’
Understanding cannot supply synthetic cognitions from conceptions, in other
words it cannot produce principles. Principles for Kant are a priori
cognitions, like mathematical axioms (there can be only one straight line
between two points). Kant ascribes them a purely regulative, rather than
constitutive function. ‘Knowledge from principles is, therefore, that
knowledge alone in which I apprehend the particular in the universal through
concepts.’
So whilst the understanding operates by linking its structures to a given
content, Reason, in its logical and pure use, operates independently of
experience.
Understanding
may be regarded as a faculty which secures the unity of appearances by means of
rules, and reason as being the faculty which secures the unity of the rules of
understanding under principles. Accordingly, reason never applies itself
directly to experience or to any object, but to understanding, in order to give
to the manifold knowledge of the latter an a priori unity by means of concepts, a unity which may be called the unity
of reason, and which is quite different in kind from any unity that can be
accomplished by the understanding.
This
separation of reason from the realm of experience is of interest to our
exploration of Foucault’s notion of rationalité.
Understanding operates through judgement, whilst reason through syllogism.
Whilst synthetic judgements always entail an element of intuition, syllogism
works on the basis of pure concepts and deduces through mediation the particular
from pure principles. The transcendental dialectic is developed according to a
system of transcendental ideas. In the Commentaire, we find a repeated
reference to the role of Geist in the Anthropology, for Foucault
is there attempting to situate the function of such a principle in the context
of a pragmatic investigation.
In the Anthropology Kant uses the notion of Geist as the invigorating principle of Gemüt
that moves through ideas.
An idea for Kant is more than
an idea. Kant’s point against dismissals, for instance, of an idea of the
absolute totality of all phenomena - which, due to its irrepresentability,
remains an unsolvable problem - is that in the practical use of reason such an
idea has an enormous importance in its regulative function. ‘The practice or
execution of an idea is always limited and defective, but nevertheless within
indeterminable boundaries, consequently always under the influence of the
conception of an absolute perfection’. Thus, despite having no relation to or
correspondence in the concrete [‘the idea can never be completely and
adequately presented in concreto’], an idea is anything but
superfluous.
Just as categories were pure conceptions of the understanding, transcendental
ideas are pure conceptions of Reason.
Foucault will undermine this in his Commentaire, for he ascribes to ideas
a role in the concrete that goes beyond the regulative function, or rather, he
will point to how this function effectively operates in the concrete.
However, ideas for Kant are pure absolute ‘forms’ of the structural needs of
Reason: as sensibility had two a priori forms or structures (space/time),
and understanding had twelve categories, so Reason is divided into a tripartite
system of transcendental ideas.
Kant seems so content with his
system that he writes that the progression between one transcendental idea to
the next is ‘so natural that it seems to resemble the logical advance of
reason from premises to conclusion’…
The exercise of Reason in Kant functions as a
regulative activity, what makes one think what he does. However, what
characterises Foucault’s early works on madness is that this notion is also
taken to signify the thought of transgression that can inhabit the fragile space
between madness and art, or practices of freedom in aesthetics of existence. To
reason is to think the realm of the possible, and thus also the impossible,
Foucault clarifies that through reasoning on the limits imposed on thinking and
acting today what is at stake is not only description but the theoretical
enactment of a counter-practice of subjectivation. In an implicit critique to
modern forms of Weberianism, he says: ‘I don’t believe one can speak of an
intrinsic notion of ‘rationalisation’ without on the one hand positing an
absolute value inherent in reason, and on the other taking the risk of applying
the term empirically in a completely arbitrary way.’
Foucault claims that regimes of practices do not exist without a specific regime
of rationality, with its codification and prescriptions - establishing how it
forms an ensemble of rules, procedures, and relations of means to ends - and
true and false formulations – through which a domain of objects is determined
that makes it possible to articulate true or false propositions.
The study of rationalities for Foucault consists
in looking at the interconnections made between codes that rule over ways of
doing things – establishing for instance how people are to be graded, examined
and classified - and the production of true discourses that serve as a basis and
justification, through reasons and principles, of these ways of doing things.
In this, he is both taking up the regulative function of Ideas in the concrete
as well as critiquing the paralogisms that produce and reproduce them.
Such study is geared towards the creation of
possibilities for effective transformative practices. Foucault’s definition of
the aesthetics of existence is in this respect important for it points to the
interconnections of practices of transformation, knowledge and production.
Aesthetics
of existence and déprise de soi.
For
me intellectual work is related to what you could call aestheticism, meaning
transforming yourself. […] I know very well that knowledge can do nothing
for transforming the world. […] But I know that knowledge can transform us,
that truth is not only a way of deciphering the world (and maybe what we call
truth does not decipher anything), but that if I know the truth I will be
changed.
We have already mentioned that
aesthetics is for Foucault the practice of transforming oneself. He refers to
the Ancients to explain the importance of aesthetics as an epistemological
activity. The study of different practices and theorisations of the idea of the
self, from care to hermeneutics, are shown to highlight the role of Reason as a
universal and regulative principle in philosophy.
The kind of attention that
the Stoics wanted people to have towards themselves, towards the conformity
between what they had to do and what they had done, starts a new kind of
relationship to oneself as a permanent attention but the problem was not at
all to decide what people really were. What they were was not important; the
problem was whether the things they had been doing was conforming to the law.
A new relationship becomes important in Christianity: people started to ask
and question the ideas and whether in the things they have been doing they
could recognize what the reality of themselves was: the real degree of purity
of their soul, since the problem of Christianity is to attain a degree of
purity to attain salvation, whilst the relation between purity and salvation
cannot be found in the Stoics where on the contrary you have a problem of
conformity and perfection in this world.
Foucault claims that reason
comes to supplant the aesthetics of existence with the Stoics and that this is
relevant for understanding ethics as a practice of subjectivation.
In fact it is the study of the role of reason in the formation of community and
practices of self government that interests us in relation to the hermeneutics
of the self. Thus when he mentions aesthetics of existence, he refers to the
practices of self transformation that can be thought of in a determinate set of
power relations. The accent is on self transformation because Foucault never
claims that power relations can be eliminated: what he calls for is the
reduction ad minimum of government on and by others. It is a particular
political technology that he is criticising, that which subjects and subjugates
other people excessively, outside of the dualistic schema of positive and
negative freedom, for freedom is nothing but the practice of self government. An
aesthetic of existence only has value when inserted within a reflection on
biopower and biopolitics and when it explicitly avoids turning into cults of the
self and modern forms of dandyism. In the following section, we will investigate
how Foucault warned us against them precisely with recourse to the history of
practices of self transformation in their relation to truth and politics. We
have already anticipated that the reflection on aesthetics in Foucault is in our
view related to the Kantian system in so far as it addresses the faculty of
perception and its structures albeit from a social and historical point of view.
This is why we would like to look at Foucault’s work on the history of
sexuality as an intervention in the present through the 1982 set of lectures,
for they explicitly point to the role of aesthetics and transformation in modern
philosophy.
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M. Foucault, Commentaire, 1961, p. 10: ‘The presence of the Geist,
and with it, of this dimension of the liberty and of the totality that
transcends the Gemüt, is such that there can be no truthful
anthropology that is not pragmatic, each fact is then taken within the open
system of Können and of Sollen.
And Kant finds no reason to write of any other [system]. Within these
conditions, doesn’t the Geist deal with this enigmatic ‘nature of
our reason’ and then with the question of the Dialectics and of the
Methodology of Pure Reason? This is the disconcerting notion that seems to
suddenly refer the Critique, once reached its apex, towards an
empirical region, towards a domain of facts where man will be doomed to a
very original passivity [longe]; will be given all of a sudden to the
transcendental; and the conditions of experience will be related finally to
the primary inertia of a Nature. But does this ‘nature of reason’ here
play the same role as the nature of human understanding in Hume: of primary
explication and final reduction?’
It is difficult to establish how Kant read Plato, since it wasn’t until
after 1800 that Schleiermacher launched an edition of the dialogues, but he
does refer to Plato’s ideas, albeit in a confusing manner. In fact, whilst
he claims to take up Plato’s theorisation of ideas in order to complement
it, Kant’s ideas are very different from Plato’s. In the latter, ideas
belong to the world of the hyperphysical and are ‘beyond’ reason, whilst
Kant seems to imply that ideas emanate from Reason and are its absolute
paradigms.
Kant summarises it very clearly in this passage: ‘The genus is representation
in general (representatio). Subordinate to it stands
representation with consciousness (perceptio). A perception which
relates solely to the subject as the modification of its state is sensation
(sensatio), an objective perception is knowledge (cognitio). This is either intuition or concept
(intuitus vel conceptus). The former relates immediately to the
object and is single, the latter refers to it mediately by means of a
feature which several things may have in common. The concept is either an empirical
or a pure concept. The pure concept, in so far as it has its
origin in the understanding alone (not in the pure image of sensibility), is
called a notion. A concept formed from notions and transcending the
possibility of experience is an idea or concept of reason. Anyone who
has familiarised himself with these distinctions must find it intolerable to
hear the representation of the colour, red, called an idea. It ought not to
even be called a concept of understanding, a notion’. Kant, Critique of
Pure Reason, 2003, p. 314, B376-B377