Taking thought to its breaking point
Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous:
Interlude XLII. A break, almost
From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...
Chapter 5 - In the Labyrinth cont...
Hence the second aspect of Kant’s “Copernican revolution” in philosophy: his suggestion that human beings are both able and obliged to construct a moral and political world for themselves, using Ideas of Reason. And though Kant believed that such a construction, if carried out within the bounds of reason, would vindicate traditional Christian ideas of God, moral responsibility, and the soul’s immortality, an inescapable consequence of Kant’s “transcendental” critique was to grant to the human being a creative power of intrinsically uncertain scope. After Kant’s critical revolution, Foucault comments, “the world appears as a city to be built, rather than as a cosmos already given.” [Or a City of God]
p140
...Despite its apparent eccentricity, Kant’s book [the Anthropology] underlines for Foucault the manifold ways in which “the self, by becoming an object” of regulated social practices, “takes its place in the field of experience and finds there a concrete system of belonging.” This system is “immediate and imperative”; no human being may escape it; it is transmitted in “the regulated element of language,” organized “without the intervention of a force or authority,” activated within each subject “purely and simply because he speaks.”
At first glance, the evident power of social practices to construct, regulate, and limit the significance accorded experience underlines the extent to which the human being must grow up within a world not of its own making. Yet on another level, comments Foucault, “the secret of Power” is revealed in the sheer disorderly proliferation of the phenomena investigated by Kant in his anthropology: “egoism, the effective consciousness of respresentation [sic]; or, in addition, the imagination as a power of creative ‘invention,’ the imagination in the shipwreck of the dream, the imagination in the poetry linked to the sign; or, in addition; the power of desire with its emotions; the false truth of passion...”
For Kant, the explanation for the sheer diversity of human practices lay in freedom. What was “practical,” as he defined the term in The Critique of Pure Reason, was “everything that is possible through freedom.” The uncertain status of the Anthropology, in Kant’s work, derives from the uncertain limits of its “practical” precepts. As Foucault puts it, the practices that Kant describes exhibit “the ambiguity of Play (game = plaything)” and “the uncertainty of Art (skill = trick).”
p141
Call them “play” or call them a type of “artifice,” what attitude should we take towards these practices? If transcendental ideas might become practical, through the exercise of the mysterious and, strictly speaking, unknowable power of free will, by what right or rule could Kant (or society) limit the scope of this power?
Heidegger, for one, thought that Kant had tried to evade the implications of his philosophical breakthrough. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had laid bare the synthetic powers of freedom and imagination, only to draw back, wrote Heidegger, “before this abyss. He saw the unknown; he had to draw back.” Instead of taking the full measure of his discoveries, Kant tried to justify “the notions of the composition and characteristics of the subjectivity of the subjects provided by traditional anthropology.” Because “anthropology in general does not raise the question of transcendence,” Kant’s turn to anthropology amounted to a failure of nerve.
Foucault shared Heidegger’s view. Though Kant had opened, “in a manner which is still enigmatic, metaphysical discourse and a reflection on the limits of reason,” he ended by “closing this opening when he ultimately referred all critical interrogation to the anthropological question.” Instead of exercising the power of free will and imagining “a city to be built,” Kant in his Anthropology tried to vindicate a “normative understanding,” not only by codifying the kind of savoir faire acquired in the course of everyday life, but also by accusing of “high treason” anyone who regarded such know-how as counterfeit and illusory. As Foucault sums up the argument of his thesis in The Order of Things, Kant’s philosophy produces, “surreptitiously and in advance, the confusion of the empirical and the transcendental, even though Kant had demonstrated the division between them.”
It is precisely this confusion that Foucault thinks vitiates the phenomenology of Husserl and his existentialist successors. They revert to “a precritical analysis” in their celebration of the “life-world” -- a domain of passive rather than active synthesis.
Foucault, by contrast, wishes, at least provisionally, to uphold Kant’s sharp division between the empirical and the transcendental. Like Heidegger, he believes that Kant has laid bare the transcendental power of the human being, even if he has recoiled from the implications of our ability to transcend every limit; in addition, he supposed that Kant’s Anthropology has revealed, even if inadvertently, the “truly temporal dimension” of the a priori: our essential categories and judgments grow out of customs, habits, and inclinations, transmitted through language and regulated by social institutions.
p142
The task of philosophy in the wake of Kant is thus twofold: first, it must examine the “historical a prioris” of possible experience through an empirical investigation of their tangled and often buried de facto roots in customs, habits, social institutions, scientific disciplines, and the specific language-games and styles of reasoning that informed each of these different domains. Spurning the composition of conventional philosophical treatises and commentaries, Foucault would devote his life to investigating many of the same topics treated in Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View -- notably dreams, mental illness, and “the marvelous play of the human imagination”; the relative value of visual images, symbols, and abstract ideas as means of communication; the structure of cognition and its limits’ the faculty of desire and “the character of the sexes” -- showing how institutions and practices traverse all of these facets of the human being, enclosing and cultivating the field of possible experience, long before the active understanding of the individual comes into play. This endeavor he will come to call “the analytics of truth.”
The second part of the twofold task of philosophy is to explore, without Kant’s inhibitions, the frontiers of possible experience. By exercising the transcendental freedom that Kant himself established as one basis of critique, one might also obtain a critical perspective on the “dark, firm net” of custom and habit, and elaborate what Foucault later called an “ontology of ourselves.” And one might do this most forcefully, as Foucault cryptically writes in his thesis, by moving from “an interrogation of the limit and of transgression” toward “an interrogation of the return of the self.”
Only one thinker, Foucault concludes in 1960, has so far grasped the full implications of this twofold task -- Friedrich Nietzsche: “The trajectory of the question, ‘What is Man?,’ in the field of philosophy, culminates in the challenging and disarming response: ‘the Overman.’”
Taking thought to its breaking point.
In the years after completing his theses, Foucault pursued the implications of Kant’s philosophy along two parallel paths. On the level of empirical inquiry, he investigated, using techniques of Bachelard and Canguilhem, the prehistory of the human sciences, one of the most important sources for the material in Kant’s original Anthropology.
“I was above all trying to order and compare three different scientific practices,” he later recalled. “By ‘scientific practice,’ I mean a certain way of regulating and constructing discourses that define, in turn, a particular domain of objects while simultaneously determining an ideal subject destined to know them. I had found it striking that three distinct domains -- natural history, grammar, and political economy -- had been constituted, in regard to their rules, more or less in the same period, during the seventeenth century, and had undergone, one hundred years later, analogous transformations.”
... On the level of transcendental inquiry, on the other hand, Foucault remained fascinated by “an interrogation of the limit and of transgression,” directed toward “the return of the self” -- the Dionysian project of Nietzsche, and also of Roussel, Bataille, and Blanchot: “Ought we not to remind ourselves,” he asked in the The Order of Things, “that we are bound to the back of a tiger?”
Interrogating the limit, a thinker might yet recapture the “experience, not yet divided, of division itself,” [I’m still assuming this is a reference to individuation] thereby illuminating simultaneously the empirical and transcendental dimensions of the human being. “Perhaps the experience of transgression,” Foucault speculated, “in the movement which carries it toward utter night, brings to light the relation of finitude to being, the moment of the limit which anthropological thought, since Kant, could only designate from afar.” To the extent that it makes possible a revelation of the limits of reason and of the human being, transgression accomplishes a kind of post-Kantian “critique” in “a three-fold sense”: “it brings to light the conceptual and historical a priori; it discerns the conditions in which {philosophical thought} can find or transcend its forms of stability; it ultimately passes judgement and makes a decision about its possibilities of existence.”
By taking thought to its breaking point, transgression thus paradoxically renews “the project for a general critique of reason.” Transcendental reflection is transformed, almost beyond recognition: it breaks free of the analytic understanding, where Kant had anchored it, and sails forth into madness, the dream, and erotic delirium. In the process, Kant’s original anthropological question -- What is man? -- is transformed implicitly into Nietzsche’s question: How did I become what I am, and why do I suffer so from being what I am? “This is why transcendental reflection in its modern form does not, as in Kant, find its fundamental necessity in the existence of a science of nature... but in the existence -- mute, yet ready to speak, and secretly impregnated with a potential discourse -- of that not-known from which man is endlessly called toward knowledge of the self.”
p144
To express this obscure “potential discourse” requires a language that can “speak of this distance by moving into it.” Philosophy “regains its speech and gets a grip on itself again only on its borders and limits.” What restores to thought “its sovereign power is not knowledge (which is ever more predictable) or fable (which has its conventions), but, between the two and as if in an invisible no-man’s-land, the shining play of fiction.”
This sounds almost like a discussion of the physics of a black hole. Where both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics eventually breakdown and we are left with no way to even approach the reality that we know exist within. All we have are some outward signs.
That such an “interrogation” of the limit through “transgression,” in writing, but also in everyday existence, is dangerous, Foucault not only concedes, but insists: to think through and act out the enigmatic ability of the human being to pass beyond any and every specified limit is to risk a fatal vertigo (“a relativism without recourse,” as Foucault put it in 1961). The thinker flirts with self-destruction. For when the void around language “emerges in all its nakedness,” when “Desire reigns in an untamed state, as if the rigor of its rule had levelled all opposition, when Death dominates every psychological function and stands above it as its unique and devastating norm; then we recognize madness in its present form, madness as it is posited in the modern experience, as its truth” -- a strong word, here -- “and its alterity.”
Putting himself to the test, the philosopher does not hesitate. In order to know the truth, and perhaps also to find himself, he will risk losing himself: “and it is at the center of this disappearance of the philosophizing subject that philosophical language proceeds, as if through a labyrinth.
No comments:
Post a Comment