New APPS

Foucault published Madness and Civilization in 1961; before that, there was relatively little published work, and his early career work of the 1950s has been neglected until quite recently.  Some of it is starting to appear, in particular work that he did at the University of Lille: two manuscripts: one on Binswanger and Existential Analysis and one on Phenomenology and Psychology; and a course on Anthropology. 

The Anthropology course, La question anthropologique, is of obvious interest because it can help to provide some backstory to Foucault’s anti-anthropology chapter in Order of Things, in which he ties anthropology to humanism as a historical moment whose time is passing.  As he writes there, “man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge” and was made possible only by larger epistemic arrangements.  The dissolution of that episteme would famously lead to the disappearance of the problem:

“If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (423).

That was 1966.  The Anthropology course were lectures Foucault gave in late 1954 and early 1955 at Lille.  Broadly, as Arianna Sforzini writes in the introduction to the lectures,

“Foucault is in agreement with the observation formulated by Heidegger from 1929: ‘anthropology today is no longer, and hasn’t for a long time, just been the title of a discipline.’ He [Foucault] is going to try to show how the question ‘what is man,’ initiated by Kant and inverted by Nietzsche, has become, in the period of a short century, the gravitational center of thought; how it upended the theoretical orientations of philosophy, nourished and legitimated the parallel construction of the ‘sciences of man,’ and finally sketched for phenomenology … its points of theoretical tension and its unsurmountable limits” (235).

In one sense, Foucault’s high-altitude take on anthropology hadn’t changed a lot in the decade prior to 1966.  But in another sense, and a little below the surface, the internal parts of it totally had.  For example, the name Feuerbach occurs exactly once in Order of Things in a passage I’ll come to in a moment.  By contrast, in La question anthropologique, Feuerbach occupies a prominent place: after talking about the 18^th Century and Kant, Foucault spends a few pages on Hegel and then goes into Feuerbach in considerable detail before a few pages on Marx and then moving on to Dilthey.  The end of anthropology is marked by Nietzsche, Jaspers and Heidegger. 

In Order of Things, in the human sciences chapter, Foucault proposes:

“What occurred at the time of Ricardo, Cuvier, and Bopp, the form of knowledge that was established with the appearance of economics, biology, and philology, the thought of finitude laid down by the Kantian critique as philosophy’s task – all that still forms the immediate space of our reflection. We think in that area.” (419).

He then says (with apologies for the long quote):

“And yet the impression of fulfilment and of end, the muffled feeling that carries and animates our thought, and perhaps lulls it to sleep with the facility of its promises, and makes us believe that something new is about to begin, something we glimpse only as a thin line of light low on the horizon – that feeling and that impression are perhaps not ill founded. It will be said that they exist, that they have never ceased to be formulated over and over again since the early nineteenth century; it will be said that Hölderlin, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx all felt this certainty that in them a thought and perhaps a culture were coming to a close, and that from the depths of a distance, which was perhaps not invincible, another was approaching – in the dim light of dawn, in the brilliance of noon, or in the dissension of the falling day. But this close, this perilous imminence whose promise we fear today, whose danger we welcome, is probably not of the same order. Then, the task enjoined upon thought by that annunciation was to establish for man a stable sojourn upon this earth from which the gods had turned away or vanished. In our day, and once again Nietzsche indicated the turning- point from a long way off, it is not so much the absence or the death of God that is affirmed as the end of man” (419-20)

The task for Hölderlin, Feuerbach, Hegel and Marx, then, was to establish a positive human identity – a “man” – independently of divine sanction.  The contrast is clear enough: one need only think of Descartes’ Meditations, where the meditator is only able to secure anything more certain than his own existence with the knowledge of God and that God created him. Absent God, how can you know who you are in a metaphysically certain way?  On this account, Nietzsche dissolves the question.

But the constellation of figures is an odd one.  To begin with, one might have thought that Hegel was all about securing the role of God’s presence on earth.  This is very much how you might read the introduction to the Philosophy of History lectures, for example, which Hegel directly presents as a theodicy:

“we must not imagine God to be too weak to exercise his wisdom on the grand scale. Our intellectual striving aims at realizing the conviction that what was intended by eternal wisdom, is actually accomplished in the domain of existent, active Spirit, as well as in that of mere Nature. Our mode of treating the subject is, in this aspect, a Theodicaea — a justification of the ways of God — which Leibnitz attempted metaphysically, in his method, i.e., in indefinite abstract categories — so that the ill that is found in the World may be comprehended, and the thinking Spirit reconciled with the fact of the existence of evil’ (29).

Now, one might say, Hegel’s theodicy is motivated by a fear that the divine is not actually present.  After all, a few pages later, Hegel notes that the theodicy is provoked by the catastrophic events of history.  As he puts it, “even regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized — the question involuntarily arises — to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered” (35).  But this doesn’t really work; the narrative voice of Descartes’ Meditations is, after all, trying to dispel the possibility that everything he perceives through is senses is not just false but malicious.

Hegel is not particularly prominent in Order.  Marx is also not particularly prominent, except insofar as Foucault is at pains to dismiss the idea that Marxism represents anything genuinely revolutionary.  As he writes:

“At the deepest level of Western knowledge, Marxism introduced no real discontinuity; it found its place without difficulty, as a full, quiet, comfortable and, goodness knows, satisfying form for a time (its own), within an epistemological arrangement that welcomed it gladly … History will cause man’s anthropological truth to spring forth in its stony immobility; calendar time will be able to continue; but it will be, as it were, void, for historicity will have been superimposed exactly upon the human essence” (285-6).

From this point of view, Marx(ism) is no different from Hegel, though Marx himself is harder to classify (my contribution to the literature on this is here; I’ll have things to say about the Marx part of the anthropology lectures in later posts).

Hölderlin gets minor treatment in both Order and La question anthropologique, and I’ll leave him aside here.  What’s somewhat surprising in the context of Order of Things is the diminution of Feuerbach.  It’s not just that Feuerbach is prominent in the early work.  It’s also that Feuerbach is prominently presented as a humanist in Althusserian arguments from the mid-1960s.  Recall the basic Althusserian thesis: Marx’s early thought is a Feuerbachain humanism, and after an epistemological “rupture” in 1845-6, Marx abandons humanism for his later, “scientific” thought (For Marx, 32).  That was 1962.  By 1965, Rancière writes in his contribution to Reading Capital that:

“In the [Marx’s 1844] Manuscripts, economic objects are treated in an amphibolic manner [the reference is to Kantian aporiae] because the theory of wealth is covered by a Feuerbachian theory of the sensible.  The sensible character of objects of labor looks back to their human character, to their status as objects of a constitutive subjectivity.  Here [in Capital] the objects are not taken as human-sensible.  They are sensible-suprasensible.  This contradiction in the mode of their appearance recalls the type of objectivity they fall under.  Their character as  sensible-suprasensible is the form in which they appear as manifestations of their social character” (47).

In 1968, Althusser’s Théorie series published an edition of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity. In short, Feuerbach was in the air in Althusserian circles.  And we know that Foucault was aware of what was going on in Althusserian ciricles.  Not only had Foucault been a student of Althusser, he favorably cited Althusser’s reading of Marxism. In a 1966 interview with Madeline Chapsal, Foucault proposes:

“Our task is to free ourselves definitively from humanism, and it is in this sense that our work is political work, insofar as all the regimes of the East or West pass out their bad goods under the flag of humanism. We have to denounce all these mystifications, like today, inside the Communist Party, where Althusser and his courageous companions are struggling against “Chardino-Marxism.”” (33; I’ve talked about this passage here).

So: whither Feuerbach, or, perhaps the same, why Feuerbach?  Next time I’ll start some thoughts on this question.