New APPS

Last time, I setup a question about Foucault’s anti-humanism.  His comments in Order of Things are famous, and the recent publication of a 1954-5 lecture course he delivered at Lille as La question anthropologique offers a chance to think about the evolution of his thought on the subject.  One clue that something is different is that Ludwig Feuerbach, one of the “Young Hegelians” in Marx’s early-career circle, is prominent in the 1950s version but not the one ten years later, even though Feuerbach’s name was prominently associated with objectionable humanism by Foucault’s teacher Althusser at the time Order of Things appeared.

I want to approach the questions that this poses not by asking where Feuerbach went – I don’t really have any evidence on that either way (yet?) – but to ask where Feuerbach came from in the 1950s.  Recent scholarship offers some really interesting work on that question.  If one were to ask where Foucault got the idea of anti-humanism, Heidegger would be an obvious starting point.  As Arianna Sforzini suggests in her introduction to La question anthropologique, “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.” (235, the Heidegger reference is to his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 147 in the English. Original: GA 5, 209).

We know that Foucault had read a lot of Heidegger.  Jean-Baptiste Vuillerod’s recent La naissance de l’anti-hégélianisme, about which much more later, reports that “we find in the Foucault archives hundreds of pages of notes taken on Heidegger, which he read in German.”  In box 33a-0, for example, “we find long commentaries, translations and paraphrases of the following texts:” What is called Thinking?, Letter on Humanism, ‘Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra,’ ‘Building, Dwelling, thinking,” “Nietzsche’s Word: God is Dead,” “Overcoming Metaphysics,” “The Age of the World Picture,” “Anaximander’s Language,” and “a series of citations on the principal Heideggerian concepts.”

This is an impressive reading list, and it shows Foucault focusing on Heidegger’s work from the late 1930s until the early 1950s.  The Letter on Humanism was from 1946-7 and was anthologized in Wegmarken (= GA 9). “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” was from 1950.  Indeed, a number of these texts – as well as the “Question Concerning Technology” and “The Thing”  – were (re)published together as Vorträge und Aufsätze (republished as GA 7) in the beginning of 1954.  Heidegger also gets a lot of references in the last section of La question anthropologique, on the end of anthropology (which I haven’t worked through yet, so what follows is subject to revision).

Still, reading Heidegger doesn’t seem to get you to Feuerbach.  The name Feuerbach does not appear in Vorträge und Aufsätze or in the “Letter on Humanism.” Heidegger mentions Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach in “Kant’s Thesis on Being” (1962, thus after Foucault’s Lille notes):

“In view of that which today is, which as the existent besets us and which as possible Not-Being threatens us, Kanťs thesis about being strikes us as abstract, meager, and pale. For, meanwhile, it has also been demanded of philosophy that it no longer be satisfied with interpreting the world and roving about in abstract speculations, but rather that what really matters is changing the world practically. But the world-change thus intended requires beforehand that thinking be changed, just as a change of thinking already exists behind the demand we have mentioned [Allein, die so gedachte Weltveränderung verlangt zuvor, daß sich das Denken wandle, wie denn auch hinter der genannten Forderung bereits eine Veränderung des Denkens steht]. (Cf. Karl Marx, German Ideology : “A.Theses on Feuerbach ad Feuerbach, 11.”: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” ) (8-9, GA 9, 446-7)

Heidegger uses almost identical language in a 1969 interview, where he ties the Weltveränderung to the need for a change in Weltvorstellung (world-representation).  So acting differently in the sense necessary to change the world requires first understanding the world differently, an argument that seems to me to be behind, e.g., the “Age of the World Picture” and (especially) the “Question Concerning Technology.”

Heidegger, then, isn’t talking about Feuerbach – he’s citing Marx’s citation of Feuerbach, and that only somewhat tangentially.

What about the discussion of anthropology in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics that Sforizi references?  Here it seems to me that the diagnosis of anthropology is more interesting, though it will take some time to see why.  It doesn’t emphasize Feuerbach, but I think looking at it offers some insight, or at least lays the groundwork for getting some insight, into some fundamental similarities and differences between Heidegger and Foucault.  The Heidegger passage in its context is as follows.  Heidegger had just finished describing Anthropology as a sufficiently heterogeneous set of concerns that the idea of Anthropology itself risked “becom[ing] mired in complete indeterminacy [ihre Idee zur völligen Unbestimmtheit herabsinkt]” (147/GA 209).  Heidegger then writes:

“Today, then, Anthropology is no longer just the name for a discipline, nor has it been such for some time. Instead, the word describes a fundamental tendency of man’s contemporary position with respect to himself and to the totality of beings [Grundtendenz der heutigen Stellung des Menschen zu sich selbst und im Ganzen des Seienden]. According to this fundamental position, something is only known and understood if it is given an anthropological explanation. Anthropology seeks not only the truth about human beings, but instead it now demands a decision [Entscheidung] as to what truth in general can mean” (147).

That this procedure is going to be limited is evident in Heidegger’s use of the “totality of beings.”  Heidegger is never interested in the totality of beings; he is interested in what makes them beings, in the relation between their status as beings and Being itself. From that point of view, an anthropological explanation is going to be philosophically shallow.  Moreover, looking for the “truth about human beings” is likely to be suspect, especially since that’s supposed to depend on a decision about truth in general.  Whatever else truth means in Heidegger, it is not a matter of decision – it is a matter of unconcealment on the part of the object whose truth is revealed.  The reduction of truth to “decision” betrays what he will later call a technological thinking – “enframing” things rather than allowing them to reveal themselves [Gelassenheit].

This sort of parsing of Heidegger’s language might be pedantic, but I think it’s supported by the remainder of the section. He follows that:

“No time has known so much and such a variety about mankind as is the case today. No time has been able to present its knowledge of mankind so urgently and in so captivating a manner as is the case today …. But also, no time has known less about what man is than today. In no other time has man become as questionable as in ours” (147).

Heidegger then wonders if this state of affairs would lend itself to the development of a “philosophical anthropology.” Such an endeavor could have two senses.  One would be sort of a “regional ontology” that attempted to differentiate the human from other kinds of things.  He then suggests that such an endeavor “is not at the center of philosophy” (147).  The other strategy would be to determine “the place of man in the cosmos,” which Heidegger thinks “must bring human subjectivity in as the central starting point” if “man is reputed to be that being which is simply the first given and most certain in the order of grounding an absolutely certain knowledge.”  This indeterminacy of the question means that one must resist anthropologism in philosophy (148).

More significantly, before undertaking the task, one really ought to ask “to what extent are all philosophical problems resident in the essence of human beings?” (148).  Until anthropology is properly “ground[ed] in the essence of philosophy,” a philosophical anthropology would itself be ungrounded and indeterminate (149). 

The basic elements of Heideggerian thought are clear enough here: the move to an essence, whether from beings to Being, or artifacts to the essence of technology.  Here we are to move from the determination of the human essence back to the essence of thinking (since humans think).  The result is undoubtedly anti-humanist in the sense that it decenters questions about humans, though Heidegger thinks that’s not particularly interesting. Hence he comments that  “the opponents of anthropology are able to refer back to the fact that human beings do not belong at the center of beings, but that there is a ‘sea’ of beings ‘alongside’ them – a rejection of the central position of philosophical anthropology, which is no more philosophical than is affirming it” (149).

Heidegger thinks “the question concerning human beings” is an important one.  He just doesn’t think that anthropology has any philosophical traction in addressing it:

“’Philosophical anthropology’ may indeed produce such diverse and essential knowledge about human beings, yet for just that reason it can never rightfully claim to be a fundamental discipline of philosophy because it is anthropology. On the contrary: it conceals [birgt] in itself the constant danger that the necessity of developing the question concerning human beings first and foremost as a question, with a view toward laying of the ground for metaphysics, will remain concealed [verdeckt]” (153).

Thus for Heidegger on anthropology.  Heidegger doesn’t think anthropology is philosophically interesting, despite how common it is.  Foucault thinks it is interesting, because of how common it is. But what about Kant’s role in this?  I’ll look at that next time.