New APPS

I have been working through (part 1, part 2) some of what Foucault says about anthropology in his 1954-5 course at Lille, recently published as La question anthropologique.  In particular, Foucault’s course pays careful attention to Feuerbach, a figure who is notably absent by the time of Order of Things.  Where does the emphasis come from?  I made the case last time that it’s probably not Heidegger.  Here I want look a bit more closely not at what Heidegger says about anthropology, but what he says about Kant’s First Critique, and to compare that with Foucault.  The short version is that I think there’s some interesting commonalities, though they push Foucault in a different direction from Heidegger.  This time I’ll look at Heidegger’s reading of Kant and contrast that with Foucault’s.  Next time, I’ll track how Foucault connects his Kant reading to anthropology, contrast that with Heidegger, and return to Foucault on Kant.

1. Heidegger: emphasis on the transcendental imagination and then retreat:

For Heidegger, at least in his 1929 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (KPM), the key to the First Critique is the transcendental imagination, by way of the schematisms.  Heidegger, as Karin de Boer and Stephen Howard remind us, was directing his reading at the thesis that the Critique was fundamentally a work of epistemology, even as his interpretation borrowed elements from several commentators with whom he did not ultimately agree.   The Critique, according to KPM, is about metaphysics, and the imagination basically does the legwork of unifying the categories and intuition.  The interpretation is phenomenological, and because it incorporates intuition, it incorporates the fundamental dependence of intuition on time.  That is, to have any act of understanding – even at the level of the schematisms, which present pre-sketches, if you like, of possible objects of experience – is to already be temporally located and oriented.

Kant says as much about intuition, when he notes that “time is the formal a priori condition of all appearances whatsoever” (B50).  Space is for outer intuitions only, but time “is the immediate condition of inner appearances (of our souls), and thereby the mediate condition of outer appearances” (B50).  Kant concludes that “Since our intuition is always sensible, no object can ever be given to us in experience which does not conform to the condition of time” (B52).   Kant takes up these remarks in the Transcendental Analytic, when he argues that space and time are “conditions of the receptivity of our mind,” “conditions under which alone it can receive representations of objects, and which therefore must also always affect the concept of these objects.” (B102).  Key to Heidegger’s interpretation is Kant’s further comment that “But if this manifold is to be known, the spontaneity of our thought requires that it be gone through in a certain way, taken up, and connected,” which has to be a synthesis (B102).

As Daniel Dahlstrom shows, Heidegger basically runs with the phenomenological interpretation that these remarks suggest, centering the schematism and its active role in enabling the categories; “if pure understanding is this spontaneous pre-forming of the unity in which something can be encountered, then it is fundamentally the work of the transcendental imagination. Pure concepts of the understanding serve as rules only insofar as they are schematized.” (Dahlstrom, 398).  In other words, “insofar as the Transcendental Analytic sets out to explain transcendental conditions of the possibility of empirical knowledge, Heidegger’s interpretation makes a powerful case that it succeeds – by Kant’s own lights, at least in the Critique’s first edition – only by according pure imagination a foundational role” (399)

This schematization means that even the concepts of the understanding depend on the temporally located imagination, which in turn means that Kantian epistemology requires an account of what one might call the world in which that activity of the categories and intuitions occurs.  As Heidegger says, “this pure schematism, which is grounded in the transcendental power of imagination, constitutes precisely the original Being of the understanding, the ‘I think substance,’ etc.” (KPM 107).

This is not, to be sure what Kant necessarily said.  It’s what Heidegger thinks is implied by Kant’s text, including what is unsaid.  As Heidegger puts it:

“Kant’s laying of the ground for metaphysics asks about the grounds for the intrinsic possibility of the essential unity of ontological knowledge. The ground upon which it comes is the transcendental power of imagination. As opposed to the arrangement of two basic sources for the mind (sensibility and understanding), the transcendental imagination obtrudes as an intermediate faculty. The more original interpretation of this previously laid ground, however, unveils this intermediate faculty not just as original, unifying center, but rather it unveils this center as the root of both stems” (KPM 137).

He continues that “original time makes possible the transcendental power of imagination” (KPM 137).  Unfortunately, having had this insight, at least implicitly, Heidegger thinks Kant retreats from it in the second edition of the Critique:

“If, however, as occurs in the second edition, the transcendental power of imagination is deleted as a particular grounding faculty and if its function is taken over by the understanding as mere spontaneity, then the possibility of grasping pure sensibility and pure thinking with regard to their unity in a finite, human reason diminishes, as does even the possibility of making it into s problem” (KPM 137).  Nonetheless, Kant’s ambivalent discovery of the importance of temporality and a temporally organized world for experience enables Heidegger to locate his own work in a Kantian lineage; as he concludes, “the laying of the ground for metaphysics grows upon the ground of time. The question concerning Being, the grounding question for a laying of the ground for metaphysics, is the problem of Being and Time” (KPM 141).

2. Foucault: picking up on the imagination

As I noted last time, Foucault had read a lot of Heidegger.  In addition to the archival notes (discussed by Vuillerod), one can note that Foucault studied extensively with Jean Wahl, who Stuart Elden points out was offering courses based on Heidegger’s untranslated (and often unpublished) writings; this had the additional merit of steering his students away from the more popular existentialist reading (see The Early Foucault, 8-11). Elden notes that KPM was translated into French as early as 1953, which suggests that there was considerable interest in it (Early Foucault, 119).  Elisabetta Basso reports that Foucault kept extensive reading notes on the text (Young Foucault, 223 n40).  Elden also relates Defert, Ewald and Gros’ suggestion that “from 1953, [Foucault was reading] Kant and Nietzsche through Heidegger.”  Elden then glosses that “the trajectory from the course on philosophical anthropology [the one I’m discussing – gh] through to the translation of Kant’s Anthropology suggests that he was reading first Kant, and then a little later Nietzsche, and ultimately both of them through and against Heidegger” (123; Vuillerod has a different interpretation, which I’ll discuss in a later post).

Of note then is that in La question anthropologique [QA] Foucault does not treat Kant as an anthropologist.  Despite the comment about the question of man, “anthropology always had marginal place and a derivative sense in Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy” prior to Feuerbach (QA 55).  Rather, anthropology is subordinated to critique: “anthropology will be neither the rule of rules nor the condition of rules, but the trace of that which, in experience, is able to indicate what ought to be subsumed under the rule” (QA 55). 

Foucault doesn’t gloss it this way, but it seems to me that a very clear indication of this priority is in the ethics, where Kant is clear that the moral “ought” is derived from the gap between what a fully rational being would do, and what we, as embodied beings, might tend to do.  But Kant is very dismissive of those who object that human beings might not be able to be moral.   The reason for this is that Kant thinks it’s wrong to reason empirically about morality in the first place; as he puts it in the Grundlegung:

“[even if there] never were actions springing from such pure sources, our concern is not whether this or that was done, but that reason of itself and independently of all appearances commanded what ought to be done” (Akademie Ausgabe [AK] IV, 407-8; I’m using the AK pagination given the number of editions of the Grundlegung).

He adds that even if we could somehow make a universal statement from human experience, morality applies to “all rational beings” and so we can’t get to that universal empirically (AK 408).  Reasoning from examples is bad because you need the principles first; examples are for “encouragement” not proof (AK 408-9).  The only way to stop doubting if morality is possible is to stop looking for it empirically.  Kant does admit that anthropology has a role, but that’s for applying, not defining, moral principles (AK 412; the same role is given to empirical psychology, AK 427).

It is for reasons such as this that Foucault can say, apropos of the Kantian treatment of totality, that “critique and the Copernican reversal that accompanies it are thus not a return to man and they do not indicate the requirement for an anthropological foundation of philosophy” (QA 58).  Foucaut, like Heidegger, spends some time on Kant’s understanding of imagination; Foucault also says that Kant elevates its role: for Kant, “the constitution of the meaning [la constitution du sens] of pure thought is made across and starting from the imagination” (QA 60).

Foucault’s emphasis is on the distinction between classical treatments of imagination and those in Kant, noting that in Kant “the imagination has an effectively anticipatory role in the synthesis of truth.”  Then, in passages that strongly suggest he read his Heidegger, he adds that “the imagination is tied in Kant to time” (QA 60) and:

“That is going to have its anthropological version: man, as the subject of knowledge, is going to appear in solidarity with the world in the form of finitude [va apparaître dans un solidarité avec la monde dans la forme de la finitude]” (QA 61).

Next time, I’ll start with how Foucault goes from this point to anthropology.