Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?"

CGC Week 7

 The group began, as usual, with questions:

[1] How compelling is Foucault’s differentiation between Enlightenment as a critical attitude or ethics and Enlightenment as a body of doctrine (p. 109)?  Does this match a form/content (or procedural/substantive) distinction?

[2] How do we characterize the limit-attitude (p. 113)?  How do we compare it to the discussion of limit-attitude in Foucault’s introduction to Kant’s anthropology (p. 69)?

[3] How do characterize “today” in Kant versus in Foucault (p. 99, 109, 118)?

[4] Movement of history, how does the present alter it?

[5} Discussion of the desirability of change (p. 114).  On what grounds might we know that change is desirable? 

[6] What is the place of Baudelaire in this piece (p. 105ff.)? What does Foucault get from Baudelaire that he doesn’t get from Kant?

 

 Discussion then ensued:

The appeal to Baudelaire offers a “countermodern” perspective (p. 105), which Foucault motivates by recognizing CB’s “acute” “consciousness of modernity”.

Baudelaire offers an interesting account, vis-à-vis Foucault, of the relation to self: “a mode of relationship to oneself” (p. 108).  But this is not just a self-relation of discovery or decipherement, but a self-relation of “invention,” says Foucault, perhaps anticipating Nietzsche (p. 108).

                Is this theme of self-invention not also in Kant?

Once we get to p. 109, we see Foucault lifting an “attitude” or “ethos” of critique, presumably out of both Kant and Baudelaire.  If they come from both IK and CB, this offers Foucault a way of taking up modernity through Kant but not solely through Kant.  This is quintessentially Foucault (cf. The Order of Things).  And it is a useful counterpoint to Habermas (cf. the context for the writing of “What Is Enlightenment?”) whose picture of modernity is strongly dialectical, and seems almost to suggest that modernity’s philosophical discourse had to run through Kant and Hegel and so forth.

This brings us to the “attitude” versus “doctrine” distinction in “WIE?” (p. 109, p. 118).

How do we understand attitude v. doctrine? A list of possible interpretations.

                Form v. Content

                Orientation v. Commitment (CK 2013 was here)

                Practice v. Theory

                Practice v. Doctrine

                Meta-philosophy v. Principle

                Ethos v. Theoria (?)

                Affect-Laden v. Rationalistic       

Foucault uses this to define modernity as an attitude, rather than as a historical event (or a time period).

Foucault specifies methodological, theoretical, and practical coherence.  But how do we establish coherence without substantive doctrines?

                How novel is the “Enlightenment” attitude?  Why not locate it more broadly?

Important is that Foucault seems to want to argue for a continuity between modernity and Enlightenment (p. 105).  The continuity is not doctrinal.  The continuity is attitudinal.

Foucault’s relation to limits.  What is the relation to Kant?  Foucault thinks of limits as “possibly transgressible”.  But Kant (at least in KrV) thinks of limits as non-transgressible.  The philosophical debate here is this: are there non-transgressibles?

But a “compatibilist” interpretation would say this: Foucault wants to transform critique as the search for non-transgressibles.  But this transformation of the practice of critique does not entail that there are no such things as non-transgressibles.

Then we discussed this in detail….