FYI.
The online version is available at
http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15505
Tetz
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Anastasia Friel Gutting <agutting@xxxxxx>
Date: 2009/3/12
Subject: NDPR Michel Foucault, Introduction à l'Anthropologie
(published in one volume with Foucault's translation of Emmanuel
Kant's Anthropologie d'un point de vue pragmatique)
To: PHILOSOPHICAL-REVIEWS@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
2009-03-14 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews
Michel Foucault, Introduction à l'Anthropologie (published in one
volume with Foucault's translation of Emmanuel Kant's Anthropologie
d'un point de vue pragmatique), Vrin, 2008, 272pp., €25.00 (pbk), ISBN
9782711619641.
Reviewed by Béatrice Han-Pile, University of Essex
________________________________
Foucault's Introduction to Kant's Anthropology (henceforth IA) and his
translation of the latter text make up his 'Thèse complémentaire de
Doctorat', which was submitted in 1961 with his main thesis (later
published as Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique). Although the
translation was published in 1964 by Vrin, with a very short
introduction by Foucault, the longer text (a 128 page manuscript kept
at the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne) remained unpublished until 2008.
Its focus is the question of the relation between the Anthropology and
the Critique, a question prompted for both exegetical and
philosophical reasons.[1] Exegetical, because it is very difficult to
date precisely the content of the Anthropology: although it is the
last text published before Kant's death, it was also a course he gave
(and constantly transformed) for over thirty years. Thus the first
four sections of IA are devoted to retracing the genesis of the final
version through comparison with other writings, both pre- (section 2)
and post-critical (section 3).[2] Philosophical reasons, because for
Foucault the key to a proper reconstruction and evaluation of both
Kant's position and post-Kantian developments resides in understanding
the relation between man as an empirical being and man as
transcendental subject. The problem is introduced early on in IA, in
the form of the following alternative:
was there from 1772 onwards, and underlying perhaps the Critique, a
certain concrete image of man that no philosophical elaboration
essentially altered, and which is formulated at last . . . in the last
of Kant's published texts? . . . But it is also possible that the
Anthropology was modified in its central elements as the critical
endeavour developed. . . . This is to say that the Critique would add
to its specific character of being a propaedeutic to philosophy a
constitutive role in the birth and future of the concrete forms of
human existence (IA: 12-13; note the use of the conditional and the
numerous modal qualifiers).
How these speculations are to be resolved is of great importance both
for Foucault's reading of Kant and for his interpretation of
modernity. If the Critique turned out to be 'constitutive' for the
Anthropology in such a way that the distinction between a priori
conditions and empirical facts was preserved, then the Kantian project
on the whole would be free of any empirico-transcendental slippage,
and Kant's Anthropology could function as a model and point of
reference for subsequent anthropologies. If, however, the relationship
of subordination was reversed and the Anthropology 'underlaid' the
Critique, then the resulting empirico-transcendental confusions would
both throw in jeopardy Kant's critical project itself and cast an
ominous shadow on the philosophical movements that grew from it. As is
well known, five years later Foucault addressed in the Order of Things
(henceforth OT), in particular chapters 7 and 9, the issue of the (in
his view) nefarious role played by 'man' in contemporary thought.
However IA is of particular interest at least for three reasons: (a)
it is a close examination (the only long piece of writing he devoted
to Kant)[3] of a text which Foucault clearly regarded as seminal, (b)
it presents an interestingly ambiguous reading of Kant which
oscillates between two incompatible theses (repetition or displacement
of the Critique by the Anthropology), an ambiguity which is minimised
but still present in OT, and (c) beyond Kant, it expands (from p. 67
onwards) on the nature and influence of anthropological thought itself
and anticipates many of the themes which will be central to OT (not
just the empirico-transcendental double but also, for example, the
analytic of finitude as the circular attempt to give empirical
conditions a transcendental role).[4]
So what does IA tell us about the relationship between the
Anthropology and the Critique? Perhaps revealingly, Foucault's text is
ambivalent almost to the end, and it is difficult to organise his
various attempts at conceptualising the relation of the two texts.[5]
Section 5 introduces the displacement thesis through an examination of
the relation between Gemüt and Geist and the suggestion that the
latter, as 'the principle which animates the spirit by means of the
ideas' (IA: 39), may constitute the 'enigmatic nature of reason'
discussed in the Transcendental Dialectics and the Canon of Pure
Reason:
a worrying notion, which seems to suddenly refer the Critique at its
apex towards an empirical region, a domain of facts where man would be
destined to a most originary passivity. All of a sudden the
transcendental would be repudiated, and the conditions of experience
would refer to the primary inertia of a nature (IA: 40; note, again,
the conditionals).
Foucault develops this claim by introducing the key theme of the
'originary'. Formally, this reason refers to the movement whereby
transcendental conditions, which according to the Critique are
timeless (being the condition of possibility of chronological time),
are temporalised within experience by the Anthropology and
consequently appear within the empirical field as pre-existing
themselves (and thus originary, or 'primitive', as Derrida puts it in
reference to Husserl).[6] Such movement is described by Foucault as
follows:
the relationship between the given and the a priori takes in the
Anthropology a structure which is the reverse of that which was
uncovered by the Critique. What was a priori in the order of knowledge
becomes in the order of concrete existence an originary which is not
chronologically first, but which, as soon as it has appeared . . .
reveals itself as already there (IA: 42).
Foucault hints (in rather Merleau-Pontyan terms) at various cases
which according to him indicate the presence of the originary
('explorations of schemas which trace in space various sorts of
insular syntheses', 'reorganisations in sensibility which allow the
neighbouring [vicariance] from one sense to the other'). But his
privileged example within Kant's work is the 'emergence of the spoken
I' (IA: 41), a third term between the pure I of transcendental
apperception, which accompanies all our judgments, and the empirical
ego. The spoken I is the
empirical and manifest form, in which the synthetising activity of the
[transcendental] I appears as an already synthetised figure, an
indissociably primary and secondary structure: . . . when it appears,
inserting itself in the multiplicity of a sensory chronicle, it
presents itself as already there (IA: 41-42, my italics).
This retrospective temporalisation of the pure I into a spoken I
(marked by the repeated use of the adverb 'already') disrupts the neat
distinctions established by the Critique (between the transcendental
and the empirical, activity and passivity, intellectual syntheses and
sensory dispersion). For Foucault, the spoken I is neither the pure I
of transcendental apperception nor the empirical ego offered to the
inner sense through the form of time, but a hybrid form, both active
and passive, a condition of possibility for experience which is
nevertheless inscribed within experience itself on the paradoxical
mode of self-preexistence. Thus 'what is an a priori of knowledge from
the perspective of the Critique does not transpose itself immediately
in anthropological reflection as an a priori of existence, but appears
in the density of a becoming where its sudden emergence infallibly
takes in retrospection the meaning of an already there' (IA: 42). For
Foucault, such 'transposition' has two nefarious consequences. At
best, the main benefit of the Critique, namely its ability to ground
the possibility of secure empirical knowledge, will evaporate as it
was entirely dependent on the separation between the transcendental
and the empirical, the constitutive and the founded, and this will
re-open the door to scepticism. At worst, anthropological thought will
try to play the part previously given to the Critique and thus give
transcendental value to empirical contents, in which case rather than
being kept awake by the haunting questions of the skeptic, we shall
promptly fall prey to the 'anthropological slumber' evoked in chapter
9 of OT.
The other, safer way to construe the relation of the Anthropology to
the Critique is as a form of repetition which, while respectful of the
empirico-transcendental distinction, performs two main functions: it
allows for further investigations of man as an empirical being, and it
prepares the passage from critical thought to the more mature
'transcendental philosophy' explored in the Opus Posthumum. This
second (and incompatible with the first) interpretative line is
presented in sections 7 and 8, and it is the one that Foucault will
settle on in the final two sections:
the empiricity of the Anthropology cannot be grounded in-itself: it is
only possible as a repetition of the Critique. . . . Thus the
Anthropology will be doubly subordinated to the Critique: as a form of
knowledge, to the conditions the latter stipulates and to the domain
of experience it determines; as an exploration of finitude, to the
primary and unsurpassable forms manifested by the Critique[7] (IA: 75;
note that this time, the conditionals and modal qualifiers have
disappeared).
This subordination of the Anthropology to the Critique is described
through the introduction of another concept (symmetrical to the
originary), namely the 'fundamental'. Its function is to ensure,
through a dynamics which both inverts and complements that of
transcendental foundation, the return from the post-hoc to the a
priori. Whereas the introduction of the transcendental standpoint in
the Critique was intended to determine, in advance of any empirical
exploration, the universal structures to which experience would
necessarily have to conform, the Anthropology's insistence on the
fundamental emphasises the obligation, in order to avoid a relapse
into naive empiricism or a 'naturalistic perspective in which a
science of man would involve knowledge of nature' (IA: 49), to refer
empirical contents back to their transcendental conditions. Thus while
the world is our 'source' of knowledge, it can only be so on the basis
of a 'transcendental correlation between passivity and spontaneity'
(IA: 54). The world provides sensory impressions which, received
through the forms of space and time (passivity), are synthetised by
the activity of the understanding (spontaneity). Similarly, the world
can only be a 'domain for action' against the background of the
'transcendental correlation between necessity and freedom' (IA: 54)
detailed in the Transcendental Dialectics (third antinomy), which
explains how human beings can both be empirically determined and
noumenally free. Whereas the originary marked the displacement of the
empirico-transcendental distinction, the fundamental is meant to
reassert it in such a way that any empirical content is systematically
referred to its transcendental conditions of possibility. Thus by
means of its insistence on the fundamental, Kant's Anthropology
provides the model of an empirical investigation which extends the
scope of the Critique without contradicting its achievements. By
contrast one must, Foucault tells us,
in the name of what anthropology must be in its essence in the whole
of the philosophical field, reject all these 'philosophical
anthropologies' which present themselves as a natural access to the
fundamental. . . . Here and there one finds at play an illusion which
is typical of Western philosophy since Kant (IA: 77).
In this vein the last two sections of IA are devoted to exploring,
mostly on a promissory note, the consequences of the setting aside of
the 'Kantian lesson' (IA: 75) exhibited by various post-Kantian
attempts to 'exert critical thought at the level of positive
knowledge' (ibid). What is characteristic of such cases is that the
originary takes over the fundamental and 'deploys itself without any
difference from the problematic of the necessary to that of existence;
it confuses the analysis of conditions and the interrogation of
finitude. One day one will have to envisage the whole development of
post Kantian philosophy from the perspective of this maintained
confusion, of this denounced confusion' (IA: 67). For Foucault,
Husserlian phenomenology is a typical example of such a development
(and Husserl is the only such philosophical example identified by name
in IA): while it was meant to 'liberate the regions of the a priori
from the forms in which reflections on the originary had confiscated
it, the effort to escape from the originary as immediate subjectivity
ultimately referred to the originary conceived in the density of
passive syntheses and of the already there' (IA: 67). Foucault expands
on this theme in his analysis of the cogito in OT:
If man is . . . that paradoxical figure in which the empirical
contents of knowledge necessarily release, of themselves, the
conditions that have made them possible [the originary], then man
cannot posit himself in the immediate and sovereign transparency of a
cogito [the 'immediate subjectivity' referred to in IA]; nor, on the
other hand, can he inhabit the objective inertia of something that, by
rights, does not and never can lead to self consciousness (OT: 322).
The first half of this sentence points to the inscription of the
transcendental within the empirical characteristic of the originary
(thus the contents necessarily release 'the conditions that have made
them [transcendentally] possible'). Since it now appears determined by
empirical contents, subjectivity cannot be defined a priori, in the
'immediate and sovereign transparency of a cogito', yet nor can it be
naturalistically reduced to empirical processes.
Thus an intermediate level is introduced, that of temporal and spatial
passive syntheses which denote a form of spontaneous activity but are
structurally incapable of being captured by consciousness: they are a
dependent aspect of conscious experience in the sense that, while they
are a condition of its possibility, they are never given on their own
(for Husserl we only apperceive intentional wholes) and can only be
characterised abstractedly, by means of such technical procedures as
the epochê and transcendental reduction. A structural instability
follows from this. On the one hand, man 'extends from a part of itself
not reflected in the cogito [the passive syntheses] to the act of
thought by which it apprehends that part' (OT: 322), presumably with
the hope of establishing a mediated (rather than immediate, as in the
Cartesian cogito) self-transparency. Should all these contents become
fully known, perhaps the possibility of a clear foundation for
knowledge would be restored.[8] On the other hand, such an attempt is
doomed from the start: man 'extends from that pure apprehension [the
act of thinking] to the empirical clutter, . . . the weight of
experiences constantly eluding themselves [passive syntheses]' (OT:
322). The more man tries to clarify these experiences by apprehending
them in thought, the more they recede from consciousness.
Correlatively, such experiences are both perceived as external to the
activity of thinking itself and yet as somehow constitutive of the
thinking subject: thus 'the question is no longer: how can the
experience of nature give rise to necessary judgments? But rather . .
. how can [man] be in the forms of non-thinking' (OT: 324). Yet the
very formulation of the question is symptomatic of the anthropological
inflection of the Copernican turn. Only within the analytic of
finitude can the issue of the paradoxical identity between man as a
transcendental subject and man as an empirical content, and the idea
of a third, originary level, appear and become of central importance.
Thus the mistake of subsequent 'philosophical anthropologies' will be
to 'give anthropology the value of a critique, a critique freed from
the prejudices and the inert weight of the a priori, whereas it can
only give access to the region of the fundamental if it remains
subordinated to the Critique' (IA: 76). OT will develop this prophetic
announcement in great detail through the introduction of the twin
themes of man as the empirico-transcendental double and of the
analytic of finitude as the type of inquiry which, unbeknownst to
itself, seeks to ground transcendental conditions in empirical
determinations and thus perverts the Kantian legacy. It goes beyond
the remit of this review to examine in detail the ways in which OT
tries to cash out the promissory notes of IA. [9] Note, however, that
Foucault's analyses of the doubles, while they do a great deal to
clarify the structure of the analytic of finitude, remain notoriously
allusive and shy away from the sort of case studies that could
establish their relevance to contemporary thought, and in particular
to phenomenology, one of Foucault's main targets. This, and modal
uncertainties in the text about the necessary (vs contingent)
character of the anthropological shift to the originary, makes them
difficult to evaluate.
This raises two crucial questions: firstly, was the transition from
criticism to the anthropological slumber necessary? In this respect,
IA is of particular interest because (contrary to OT) it suggests that
the answer has to be negative. Kant himself succeeded in avoiding the
confusions of the originary and thus showed that a form of
anthropology which remains faithful to the spirit of the critical
project was possible. Yet remember that although, on balance, Foucault
did reach this conclusion, the detail of his analyses in IA is much
more ambiguous and points out repeatedly that there are ways of
construing the Anthropology as a displacement, not just a repetition,
of the empirico-transcendental divide. This suggests that from the
start Foucault was somewhat unsure about the modality of his claims,
and that the overall verdict of IA may have been at least partially
guided by his desire to rescue Kant from the post-Kantians. This,
however, raises a second question: was Foucault right in his
identification of cases in which the Anthropology allegedly blurred
the empirico-transcendental divide? Or could alternative readings be
plausibly envisaged? For example, in the test case of the 'spoken I',
one could also see the 'emergence' of the originary highlighted by
Foucault as a false problem arising from a misapprehension of the
nature of transcendental conditions and a conflation between two
different things. These are on the one hand, the developmental
perspective in which a child will learn to speak and develop rational
abilities and, on the other, the fact that if or when someone is in
possession of such abilities, then this will entail that a certain
number of transcendental conditions must hold at that particular time,
in particular that we should be able to synthetise the sensory
manifold by means of judgments which involve the pure I of
transcendental apperception. But it does not follow from this that
such an 'I' itself should be recaptured within the element of the
genesis that the developmental story focuses on. In other words, one
could imagine an alternative interpretation according to which, rather
than a temporalisation of the transcendental, what is at stake is an
instantiation which can be identified at a particular time (say, once
the child has learned to speak) but which itself is not temporal. In
such a case, there would be no reason to think that the 'synthetic
activity of the I appears as an already synthetised figure, as an
indissociably primary and secondary structure' (IA: 41). On the
contrary, these formulations could be criticised for coming
dangerously close to the sort of error denounced in the paralogisms of
pure reason, namely the confusion between the formal, atemporal I of
transcendental apperception and a substantial ego developing itself
through time.
This reading is not without difficulties (and developmental stories
are notoriously difficult to accommodate with the framework of
transcendental philosophy), but it is not without plausibility either.
This, per se, could be enough to make us wonder whether Foucault's
identification of empirico-transcendental confusions may not have been
hasty in other instances as well. This is a question I must leave
open, although it is not hard to imagine other cases. For example,
Sartre's early thought could be interpreted, not as a victim of the
confusions specific to the originary, but as an attempt to reinstate
the empirico-transcendental distinction in its original purity, in
particular by insisting on the pure activity of consciousness and the
impossibility of identifying it with any empirical content (in The
Transcendence of the Ego). At any rate, it remains that IA forms the
pre-history of OT, a matrix in which several of Foucault's central
claims were first introduced and tested out. Readers should feel
privileged to have access to the laboratory of thought, so to speak,
where a very influential book was slowly distilled.
________________________________
[1] Note, however, that although it is very relevant to Foucault's own
concerns (thus already in 1952-3 he was teaching a course on
'Knowledge of Man and Transcendental Reflection' at the University of
Lille, his oldest preserved manuscript), this question is not
particularly central to more recent commentaries on the Anthropology,
which tend to focus more on historical issues or on its relation to
the Critique of Practical Reason and to the Critique of Judgment. See
for example: J. H. Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of
Anthropology, Chicago: Chicago UP, 2002; G. F. Munzel, Kant's
Conception of Moral Character: the 'Critical' Link of Morality,
Anthropology and Reflective Judgment, Chicago: Chicago UP, 1999; B.
Jacobs & Patrick Kain (eds.), Essays on Kant's Anthropology,
Cambridge: CUP, 2008. The closest approach I could find is that of P.
R. Frierson (Freedom and Anthropology in Kant's Moral Philosophy,
Cambridge: CUP, 2003). The book starts (p. 2 ff) by quoting
Schleiermacher's remark that there is a potential conflict in the
Anthropology between two claims: (a) insofar as human beings are the
objects of anthropological study, 'nature is choice' (e.g.: they are
determined by empirical causes); yet (b) Kant also holds that our
nature is what it is by virtue of the choice of our intelligible
character, and thus 'choice is nature'. This raises issues similar to
those Foucault is interested in but in the practical rather than in
the epistemological register (e.g. the relation between the empirical
and the noumenal rather than between the empirical and the
transcendental). Like Foucault, Frierson concludes that Kant's account
is not incoherent (see in particular chapters 5 and 6).
[2] Note that the sections are not numbered in the original text but
simply separated by stars. I have numbered them for ease of reference.
All translations are mine.
[3] The various versions of 'What is Enlightenment' are significantly shorter.
[4] See in particular p. 75 ff).
[5] Here is a shot at such organisation: while the first four sections
try to establish the relation between the Anthropology and various
other texts, sections 5 and 6 explore the displacement thesis and
introduce the theme of the originary. By contrast, sections 7 and 8
develop the repetition thesis and explore the idea that the
Anthropology, while 'repeating' the above distinction, would 'convey'
[acheminer] the Critique towards 'transcendental philosophy', itself
understood in the light of the Opus Posthumum as a bridge between the
system of the (a priori) metaphysical principles of the science of
nature and physics as an (empirical) scientia naturalis. Finally,
sections 9 and 10 decide in favour of the repetition thesis and expand
on the consequences of anthropological thought trying to pass itself
off as an empirical form of criticism.
[6] Cf. J. Derrida, Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de
Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990). For a more
detailed account of these temporal paradoxes, and on the relation
between transcendental conditions and empirical determination in the
early Foucault's work, see B. Han-Pile, ''The Death of Man': Foucault
and Humanism', in Timothy O'Leary & Christopher Falzon (eds.),
Foucault and Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming.
[7] Such as the impossibility of an intuitus intellectus in the case
of human beings.
[8] Note that this is, in fact, a fallacy since even if the empirical
limitations that bear on the transcendental could be spelled out, the
fact would remain that the mere presence of empirical determinations
at the transcendental level is enough to invalidate the possibility of
providing universal and necessary conditions for knowledge.
[9] See H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow: Michel Foucault: Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983, in particular Part I, chapter 2; G. Gutting: Michel Foucault's
Archaeology of Scientific Reason, Cambridge: CUP, 1989, in particular
chapter 6; B. Han-Pile: Foucault's Critical Project: Between the
Transcendental and the Historical, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002, in
particular part I.
The online version is available at
http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15505
Tetz
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Anastasia Friel Gutting <agutting@xxxxxx>
Date: 2009/3/12
Subject: NDPR Michel Foucault, Introduction à l'Anthropologie
(published in one volume with Foucault's translation of Emmanuel
Kant's Anthropologie d'un point de vue pragmatique)
To: PHILOSOPHICAL-REVIEWS@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
2009-03-14 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews
Michel Foucault, Introduction à l'Anthropologie (published in one
volume with Foucault's translation of Emmanuel Kant's Anthropologie
d'un point de vue pragmatique), Vrin, 2008, 272pp., €25.00 (pbk), ISBN
9782711619641.
Reviewed by Béatrice Han-Pile, University of Essex
________________________________
Foucault's Introduction to Kant's Anthropology (henceforth IA) and his
translation of the latter text make up his 'Thèse complémentaire de
Doctorat', which was submitted in 1961 with his main thesis (later
published as Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique). Although the
translation was published in 1964 by Vrin, with a very short
introduction by Foucault, the longer text (a 128 page manuscript kept
at the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne) remained unpublished until 2008.
Its focus is the question of the relation between the Anthropology and
the Critique, a question prompted for both exegetical and
philosophical reasons.[1] Exegetical, because it is very difficult to
date precisely the content of the Anthropology: although it is the
last text published before Kant's death, it was also a course he gave
(and constantly transformed) for over thirty years. Thus the first
four sections of IA are devoted to retracing the genesis of the final
version through comparison with other writings, both pre- (section 2)
and post-critical (section 3).[2] Philosophical reasons, because for
Foucault the key to a proper reconstruction and evaluation of both
Kant's position and post-Kantian developments resides in understanding
the relation between man as an empirical being and man as
transcendental subject. The problem is introduced early on in IA, in
the form of the following alternative:
was there from 1772 onwards, and underlying perhaps the Critique, a
certain concrete image of man that no philosophical elaboration
essentially altered, and which is formulated at last . . . in the last
of Kant's published texts? . . . But it is also possible that the
Anthropology was modified in its central elements as the critical
endeavour developed. . . . This is to say that the Critique would add
to its specific character of being a propaedeutic to philosophy a
constitutive role in the birth and future of the concrete forms of
human existence (IA: 12-13; note the use of the conditional and the
numerous modal qualifiers).
How these speculations are to be resolved is of great importance both
for Foucault's reading of Kant and for his interpretation of
modernity. If the Critique turned out to be 'constitutive' for the
Anthropology in such a way that the distinction between a priori
conditions and empirical facts was preserved, then the Kantian project
on the whole would be free of any empirico-transcendental slippage,
and Kant's Anthropology could function as a model and point of
reference for subsequent anthropologies. If, however, the relationship
of subordination was reversed and the Anthropology 'underlaid' the
Critique, then the resulting empirico-transcendental confusions would
both throw in jeopardy Kant's critical project itself and cast an
ominous shadow on the philosophical movements that grew from it. As is
well known, five years later Foucault addressed in the Order of Things
(henceforth OT), in particular chapters 7 and 9, the issue of the (in
his view) nefarious role played by 'man' in contemporary thought.
However IA is of particular interest at least for three reasons: (a)
it is a close examination (the only long piece of writing he devoted
to Kant)[3] of a text which Foucault clearly regarded as seminal, (b)
it presents an interestingly ambiguous reading of Kant which
oscillates between two incompatible theses (repetition or displacement
of the Critique by the Anthropology), an ambiguity which is minimised
but still present in OT, and (c) beyond Kant, it expands (from p. 67
onwards) on the nature and influence of anthropological thought itself
and anticipates many of the themes which will be central to OT (not
just the empirico-transcendental double but also, for example, the
analytic of finitude as the circular attempt to give empirical
conditions a transcendental role).[4]
So what does IA tell us about the relationship between the
Anthropology and the Critique? Perhaps revealingly, Foucault's text is
ambivalent almost to the end, and it is difficult to organise his
various attempts at conceptualising the relation of the two texts.[5]
Section 5 introduces the displacement thesis through an examination of
the relation between Gemüt and Geist and the suggestion that the
latter, as 'the principle which animates the spirit by means of the
ideas' (IA: 39), may constitute the 'enigmatic nature of reason'
discussed in the Transcendental Dialectics and the Canon of Pure
Reason:
a worrying notion, which seems to suddenly refer the Critique at its
apex towards an empirical region, a domain of facts where man would be
destined to a most originary passivity. All of a sudden the
transcendental would be repudiated, and the conditions of experience
would refer to the primary inertia of a nature (IA: 40; note, again,
the conditionals).
Foucault develops this claim by introducing the key theme of the
'originary'. Formally, this reason refers to the movement whereby
transcendental conditions, which according to the Critique are
timeless (being the condition of possibility of chronological time),
are temporalised within experience by the Anthropology and
consequently appear within the empirical field as pre-existing
themselves (and thus originary, or 'primitive', as Derrida puts it in
reference to Husserl).[6] Such movement is described by Foucault as
follows:
the relationship between the given and the a priori takes in the
Anthropology a structure which is the reverse of that which was
uncovered by the Critique. What was a priori in the order of knowledge
becomes in the order of concrete existence an originary which is not
chronologically first, but which, as soon as it has appeared . . .
reveals itself as already there (IA: 42).
Foucault hints (in rather Merleau-Pontyan terms) at various cases
which according to him indicate the presence of the originary
('explorations of schemas which trace in space various sorts of
insular syntheses', 'reorganisations in sensibility which allow the
neighbouring [vicariance] from one sense to the other'). But his
privileged example within Kant's work is the 'emergence of the spoken
I' (IA: 41), a third term between the pure I of transcendental
apperception, which accompanies all our judgments, and the empirical
ego. The spoken I is the
empirical and manifest form, in which the synthetising activity of the
[transcendental] I appears as an already synthetised figure, an
indissociably primary and secondary structure: . . . when it appears,
inserting itself in the multiplicity of a sensory chronicle, it
presents itself as already there (IA: 41-42, my italics).
This retrospective temporalisation of the pure I into a spoken I
(marked by the repeated use of the adverb 'already') disrupts the neat
distinctions established by the Critique (between the transcendental
and the empirical, activity and passivity, intellectual syntheses and
sensory dispersion). For Foucault, the spoken I is neither the pure I
of transcendental apperception nor the empirical ego offered to the
inner sense through the form of time, but a hybrid form, both active
and passive, a condition of possibility for experience which is
nevertheless inscribed within experience itself on the paradoxical
mode of self-preexistence. Thus 'what is an a priori of knowledge from
the perspective of the Critique does not transpose itself immediately
in anthropological reflection as an a priori of existence, but appears
in the density of a becoming where its sudden emergence infallibly
takes in retrospection the meaning of an already there' (IA: 42). For
Foucault, such 'transposition' has two nefarious consequences. At
best, the main benefit of the Critique, namely its ability to ground
the possibility of secure empirical knowledge, will evaporate as it
was entirely dependent on the separation between the transcendental
and the empirical, the constitutive and the founded, and this will
re-open the door to scepticism. At worst, anthropological thought will
try to play the part previously given to the Critique and thus give
transcendental value to empirical contents, in which case rather than
being kept awake by the haunting questions of the skeptic, we shall
promptly fall prey to the 'anthropological slumber' evoked in chapter
9 of OT.
The other, safer way to construe the relation of the Anthropology to
the Critique is as a form of repetition which, while respectful of the
empirico-transcendental distinction, performs two main functions: it
allows for further investigations of man as an empirical being, and it
prepares the passage from critical thought to the more mature
'transcendental philosophy' explored in the Opus Posthumum. This
second (and incompatible with the first) interpretative line is
presented in sections 7 and 8, and it is the one that Foucault will
settle on in the final two sections:
the empiricity of the Anthropology cannot be grounded in-itself: it is
only possible as a repetition of the Critique. . . . Thus the
Anthropology will be doubly subordinated to the Critique: as a form of
knowledge, to the conditions the latter stipulates and to the domain
of experience it determines; as an exploration of finitude, to the
primary and unsurpassable forms manifested by the Critique[7] (IA: 75;
note that this time, the conditionals and modal qualifiers have
disappeared).
This subordination of the Anthropology to the Critique is described
through the introduction of another concept (symmetrical to the
originary), namely the 'fundamental'. Its function is to ensure,
through a dynamics which both inverts and complements that of
transcendental foundation, the return from the post-hoc to the a
priori. Whereas the introduction of the transcendental standpoint in
the Critique was intended to determine, in advance of any empirical
exploration, the universal structures to which experience would
necessarily have to conform, the Anthropology's insistence on the
fundamental emphasises the obligation, in order to avoid a relapse
into naive empiricism or a 'naturalistic perspective in which a
science of man would involve knowledge of nature' (IA: 49), to refer
empirical contents back to their transcendental conditions. Thus while
the world is our 'source' of knowledge, it can only be so on the basis
of a 'transcendental correlation between passivity and spontaneity'
(IA: 54). The world provides sensory impressions which, received
through the forms of space and time (passivity), are synthetised by
the activity of the understanding (spontaneity). Similarly, the world
can only be a 'domain for action' against the background of the
'transcendental correlation between necessity and freedom' (IA: 54)
detailed in the Transcendental Dialectics (third antinomy), which
explains how human beings can both be empirically determined and
noumenally free. Whereas the originary marked the displacement of the
empirico-transcendental distinction, the fundamental is meant to
reassert it in such a way that any empirical content is systematically
referred to its transcendental conditions of possibility. Thus by
means of its insistence on the fundamental, Kant's Anthropology
provides the model of an empirical investigation which extends the
scope of the Critique without contradicting its achievements. By
contrast one must, Foucault tells us,
in the name of what anthropology must be in its essence in the whole
of the philosophical field, reject all these 'philosophical
anthropologies' which present themselves as a natural access to the
fundamental. . . . Here and there one finds at play an illusion which
is typical of Western philosophy since Kant (IA: 77).
In this vein the last two sections of IA are devoted to exploring,
mostly on a promissory note, the consequences of the setting aside of
the 'Kantian lesson' (IA: 75) exhibited by various post-Kantian
attempts to 'exert critical thought at the level of positive
knowledge' (ibid). What is characteristic of such cases is that the
originary takes over the fundamental and 'deploys itself without any
difference from the problematic of the necessary to that of existence;
it confuses the analysis of conditions and the interrogation of
finitude. One day one will have to envisage the whole development of
post Kantian philosophy from the perspective of this maintained
confusion, of this denounced confusion' (IA: 67). For Foucault,
Husserlian phenomenology is a typical example of such a development
(and Husserl is the only such philosophical example identified by name
in IA): while it was meant to 'liberate the regions of the a priori
from the forms in which reflections on the originary had confiscated
it, the effort to escape from the originary as immediate subjectivity
ultimately referred to the originary conceived in the density of
passive syntheses and of the already there' (IA: 67). Foucault expands
on this theme in his analysis of the cogito in OT:
If man is . . . that paradoxical figure in which the empirical
contents of knowledge necessarily release, of themselves, the
conditions that have made them possible [the originary], then man
cannot posit himself in the immediate and sovereign transparency of a
cogito [the 'immediate subjectivity' referred to in IA]; nor, on the
other hand, can he inhabit the objective inertia of something that, by
rights, does not and never can lead to self consciousness (OT: 322).
The first half of this sentence points to the inscription of the
transcendental within the empirical characteristic of the originary
(thus the contents necessarily release 'the conditions that have made
them [transcendentally] possible'). Since it now appears determined by
empirical contents, subjectivity cannot be defined a priori, in the
'immediate and sovereign transparency of a cogito', yet nor can it be
naturalistically reduced to empirical processes.
Thus an intermediate level is introduced, that of temporal and spatial
passive syntheses which denote a form of spontaneous activity but are
structurally incapable of being captured by consciousness: they are a
dependent aspect of conscious experience in the sense that, while they
are a condition of its possibility, they are never given on their own
(for Husserl we only apperceive intentional wholes) and can only be
characterised abstractedly, by means of such technical procedures as
the epochê and transcendental reduction. A structural instability
follows from this. On the one hand, man 'extends from a part of itself
not reflected in the cogito [the passive syntheses] to the act of
thought by which it apprehends that part' (OT: 322), presumably with
the hope of establishing a mediated (rather than immediate, as in the
Cartesian cogito) self-transparency. Should all these contents become
fully known, perhaps the possibility of a clear foundation for
knowledge would be restored.[8] On the other hand, such an attempt is
doomed from the start: man 'extends from that pure apprehension [the
act of thinking] to the empirical clutter, . . . the weight of
experiences constantly eluding themselves [passive syntheses]' (OT:
322). The more man tries to clarify these experiences by apprehending
them in thought, the more they recede from consciousness.
Correlatively, such experiences are both perceived as external to the
activity of thinking itself and yet as somehow constitutive of the
thinking subject: thus 'the question is no longer: how can the
experience of nature give rise to necessary judgments? But rather . .
. how can [man] be in the forms of non-thinking' (OT: 324). Yet the
very formulation of the question is symptomatic of the anthropological
inflection of the Copernican turn. Only within the analytic of
finitude can the issue of the paradoxical identity between man as a
transcendental subject and man as an empirical content, and the idea
of a third, originary level, appear and become of central importance.
Thus the mistake of subsequent 'philosophical anthropologies' will be
to 'give anthropology the value of a critique, a critique freed from
the prejudices and the inert weight of the a priori, whereas it can
only give access to the region of the fundamental if it remains
subordinated to the Critique' (IA: 76). OT will develop this prophetic
announcement in great detail through the introduction of the twin
themes of man as the empirico-transcendental double and of the
analytic of finitude as the type of inquiry which, unbeknownst to
itself, seeks to ground transcendental conditions in empirical
determinations and thus perverts the Kantian legacy. It goes beyond
the remit of this review to examine in detail the ways in which OT
tries to cash out the promissory notes of IA. [9] Note, however, that
Foucault's analyses of the doubles, while they do a great deal to
clarify the structure of the analytic of finitude, remain notoriously
allusive and shy away from the sort of case studies that could
establish their relevance to contemporary thought, and in particular
to phenomenology, one of Foucault's main targets. This, and modal
uncertainties in the text about the necessary (vs contingent)
character of the anthropological shift to the originary, makes them
difficult to evaluate.
This raises two crucial questions: firstly, was the transition from
criticism to the anthropological slumber necessary? In this respect,
IA is of particular interest because (contrary to OT) it suggests that
the answer has to be negative. Kant himself succeeded in avoiding the
confusions of the originary and thus showed that a form of
anthropology which remains faithful to the spirit of the critical
project was possible. Yet remember that although, on balance, Foucault
did reach this conclusion, the detail of his analyses in IA is much
more ambiguous and points out repeatedly that there are ways of
construing the Anthropology as a displacement, not just a repetition,
of the empirico-transcendental divide. This suggests that from the
start Foucault was somewhat unsure about the modality of his claims,
and that the overall verdict of IA may have been at least partially
guided by his desire to rescue Kant from the post-Kantians. This,
however, raises a second question: was Foucault right in his
identification of cases in which the Anthropology allegedly blurred
the empirico-transcendental divide? Or could alternative readings be
plausibly envisaged? For example, in the test case of the 'spoken I',
one could also see the 'emergence' of the originary highlighted by
Foucault as a false problem arising from a misapprehension of the
nature of transcendental conditions and a conflation between two
different things. These are on the one hand, the developmental
perspective in which a child will learn to speak and develop rational
abilities and, on the other, the fact that if or when someone is in
possession of such abilities, then this will entail that a certain
number of transcendental conditions must hold at that particular time,
in particular that we should be able to synthetise the sensory
manifold by means of judgments which involve the pure I of
transcendental apperception. But it does not follow from this that
such an 'I' itself should be recaptured within the element of the
genesis that the developmental story focuses on. In other words, one
could imagine an alternative interpretation according to which, rather
than a temporalisation of the transcendental, what is at stake is an
instantiation which can be identified at a particular time (say, once
the child has learned to speak) but which itself is not temporal. In
such a case, there would be no reason to think that the 'synthetic
activity of the I appears as an already synthetised figure, as an
indissociably primary and secondary structure' (IA: 41). On the
contrary, these formulations could be criticised for coming
dangerously close to the sort of error denounced in the paralogisms of
pure reason, namely the confusion between the formal, atemporal I of
transcendental apperception and a substantial ego developing itself
through time.
This reading is not without difficulties (and developmental stories
are notoriously difficult to accommodate with the framework of
transcendental philosophy), but it is not without plausibility either.
This, per se, could be enough to make us wonder whether Foucault's
identification of empirico-transcendental confusions may not have been
hasty in other instances as well. This is a question I must leave
open, although it is not hard to imagine other cases. For example,
Sartre's early thought could be interpreted, not as a victim of the
confusions specific to the originary, but as an attempt to reinstate
the empirico-transcendental distinction in its original purity, in
particular by insisting on the pure activity of consciousness and the
impossibility of identifying it with any empirical content (in The
Transcendence of the Ego). At any rate, it remains that IA forms the
pre-history of OT, a matrix in which several of Foucault's central
claims were first introduced and tested out. Readers should feel
privileged to have access to the laboratory of thought, so to speak,
where a very influential book was slowly distilled.
________________________________
[1] Note, however, that although it is very relevant to Foucault's own
concerns (thus already in 1952-3 he was teaching a course on
'Knowledge of Man and Transcendental Reflection' at the University of
Lille, his oldest preserved manuscript), this question is not
particularly central to more recent commentaries on the Anthropology,
which tend to focus more on historical issues or on its relation to
the Critique of Practical Reason and to the Critique of Judgment. See
for example: J. H. Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of
Anthropology, Chicago: Chicago UP, 2002; G. F. Munzel, Kant's
Conception of Moral Character: the 'Critical' Link of Morality,
Anthropology and Reflective Judgment, Chicago: Chicago UP, 1999; B.
Jacobs & Patrick Kain (eds.), Essays on Kant's Anthropology,
Cambridge: CUP, 2008. The closest approach I could find is that of P.
R. Frierson (Freedom and Anthropology in Kant's Moral Philosophy,
Cambridge: CUP, 2003). The book starts (p. 2 ff) by quoting
Schleiermacher's remark that there is a potential conflict in the
Anthropology between two claims: (a) insofar as human beings are the
objects of anthropological study, 'nature is choice' (e.g.: they are
determined by empirical causes); yet (b) Kant also holds that our
nature is what it is by virtue of the choice of our intelligible
character, and thus 'choice is nature'. This raises issues similar to
those Foucault is interested in but in the practical rather than in
the epistemological register (e.g. the relation between the empirical
and the noumenal rather than between the empirical and the
transcendental). Like Foucault, Frierson concludes that Kant's account
is not incoherent (see in particular chapters 5 and 6).
[2] Note that the sections are not numbered in the original text but
simply separated by stars. I have numbered them for ease of reference.
All translations are mine.
[3] The various versions of 'What is Enlightenment' are significantly shorter.
[4] See in particular p. 75 ff).
[5] Here is a shot at such organisation: while the first four sections
try to establish the relation between the Anthropology and various
other texts, sections 5 and 6 explore the displacement thesis and
introduce the theme of the originary. By contrast, sections 7 and 8
develop the repetition thesis and explore the idea that the
Anthropology, while 'repeating' the above distinction, would 'convey'
[acheminer] the Critique towards 'transcendental philosophy', itself
understood in the light of the Opus Posthumum as a bridge between the
system of the (a priori) metaphysical principles of the science of
nature and physics as an (empirical) scientia naturalis. Finally,
sections 9 and 10 decide in favour of the repetition thesis and expand
on the consequences of anthropological thought trying to pass itself
off as an empirical form of criticism.
[6] Cf. J. Derrida, Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de
Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990). For a more
detailed account of these temporal paradoxes, and on the relation
between transcendental conditions and empirical determination in the
early Foucault's work, see B. Han-Pile, ''The Death of Man': Foucault
and Humanism', in Timothy O'Leary & Christopher Falzon (eds.),
Foucault and Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming.
[7] Such as the impossibility of an intuitus intellectus in the case
of human beings.
[8] Note that this is, in fact, a fallacy since even if the empirical
limitations that bear on the transcendental could be spelled out, the
fact would remain that the mere presence of empirical determinations
at the transcendental level is enough to invalidate the possibility of
providing universal and necessary conditions for knowledge.
[9] See H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow: Michel Foucault: Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983, in particular Part I, chapter 2; G. Gutting: Michel Foucault's
Archaeology of Scientific Reason, Cambridge: CUP, 1989, in particular
chapter 6; B. Han-Pile: Foucault's Critical Project: Between the
Transcendental and the Historical, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002, in
particular part I.