New APPS

I have been working through (part 1, part 2, part 3) some of what Foucault says about anthropology in his 1954-5 course at Lille, recently published as La question anthropologique.  Last time, I focused on (1) Heidegger’s reading of Kant and (2) contrasted that with Foucault’s.  Here, I’ll track how Foucault connects his Kant reading to anthropology, contrast that with Heidegger, and return to Foucault on post-Kantian anthropology.

3. Foucault: how this begets anthropology

Heidegger’s interest in legitimating his Kant reading is at least partly in the service of legitimating his own project in Being and Time, which had appeared two years prior to Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (KPM).  Foucault’s interests are of course different, but there’s something of a Heideggerian drift to the argument.  Recall that Heidegger’s conclusion about anthropology: it may tell us lots of things about human beings, but ultimately “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]” (KPM 153/ GA 218)

According to Foucault, anthropology comes to have four levels:  interrogation of man at the level of his world; genesis of signification at the level of man; distancing from the absolute, in the absolute character of finitude, and primordial value of the theoretical elucidation of the return of man to his authenticity in the form of freedom (QA 62).  Foucault then remarks:

“It is interesting to see how they are buried again at a level of naturalism or in a form of historicism, such that if man, in this space of generalized anthropologism, would have clear right of access to his truth, he loses at the same time originary access to the truth.  And this was the most radical forgetting of the Kantian teaching to the extent that the very effort of Kant, rendered in its true sense, shows that man is only able to have access to his own truth to the extent that he has everything at home in the truth [dans la mesure même où il est ayant tout chez lui dans la vérité]” (QA 62-3).

Recall that Foucault had extensive notes on Heidegger’s “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” which claimed that “dwelling … is the basic character of Being in keeping with which mortals exist [Das Wohnen aber ist der Grundzug des Seins, demgemäß die Sterblichen sind]” (Poetry, Language, Thought, 160 / GA 7, 163).  I’m assuming that Foucault worked with the German, though a French translation appeared in 1958 (Essais et conférences, trans. André Préau), indicating interest in the text in 1950s France.  I also found a translation  online (which for all I know is from Préau) that we can use for ballasting.  It rendered this sentence as “habiter est le trait fondamental de l’être (Sein) en conformité duquel les mortels sont.”

With that in mind, let’s follow Foucault’s conclusion, pressing the translation in a Heideggerian direction:

“not: what is that truth that man dwells in [habite], but how can one dwell in [habiter] the truth?  Such is the sense of anthropology of which Kant speaks in the Logic; as far as anthropology as it develops, it responds to the question: if man inhabits the truth, how can he setup his residence [aménager sa demeure]?  And which truth ought he to dwell in [doit l’habiter] in order to build [bâtir] and to recognize, in the truth, his residence [sa demeure]?” (QA 63).

If Heidegger thinks that Kant (and thus Kantian anthropology) involves a basic retreat from a properly metaphysical question, then it seems that Foucault has an analogous diagnosis: anthropology develops by centering humans while decentering the more metaphysical question of the truth (= world) that we dwell in.  To put a (far too quick) Heideggerian gloss on it, there was a real possibility of raising ontological concerns coming out of Kant, but in anthropology you get nothing but the ontic.

What Kant bequeaths to the entire 19c, then, is this difficulty in relating anthropology to critical thought.  This gets you to phenomenology, the critique of the critique (Marx uses this term; Foucault seems to mean folks like Fichte), and the search for the “infinite task of finitude, the founding [instauration] of an authentic existence” (QA 66-7).  One thinks immediately here of when Foucault calls Sartre a “man of the nineteenth-century [trying to] think the twentieth century” (D&E I, 570 (quarto ed.)).  But also, in the 1966 interview with Madeleine Chapsal, Foucault proposes that “the weightiest heritage that we get from the nineteenth-century – it is high time we got rid of it – is humanism.”  When Chapsal prods “humanism?” Foucault explains:

“Humanism has been a manner of resolving, in terms of morality, values and reconciliation, the problems that we have not been able to resolve more generally [du tout].  Do you know Marx’s expression?  Humanity only poses the problems that it can solve.  I believe that we can say: humanism pretends to solve [feint de résoudre] the problems that it cannot pose” (33, D&E I, 544 [quattro. ed]).

In the interview where he locates Sartre in the 19^th Century, Foucault suggests that dialectics is the problem and that it promotes a “human being who will become an authentic and true man,” adding that “in this sense, the great responsible parties for contemporary humanism are evidently Hegel and Marx” (D&E I, 569).

4. But also not doing The Heidegger Thing

All of that said, Foucault is not going the same direction as Heidegger.  After emphasizing the cultural specificity of humanism, he notes that the beginning of the end appeared not only in Nietzsche, but in “equally in Heidegger, when he tried to grasp again [ressaisir] the fundamental relation of being in a return to the Greek origin.”  (DE&E I, 570).  However, Heidegger is an exemplar of antihumanist thought, not its guiding light.  Foucault continues:

“It also appears in Russel, when he makes the logical critique of philosophy; in Wittgenstein, when he posed the problem of the relations between logic and language; in the linguists; in the sociologists like Lévi-Strauss” (570). 

He had earlier cited the same group (minus Wittgenstein) as an “analytic reason” which is “incompatible with humanism” (569).  The relevant move is to the ways knowledge (broadly conceived: logic, language, episteme, etc.) structures possible experience:

“It seems to me that the non-dialectical thought which is constituted today does not put into play nature or existence [l’existence], but what knowledge [savoir: knowledge in general] is. Its proper object will be knowledge, in such a manner that this thought will be in a secondary position with relation to the ensemble, to the general network of our knowledges [connaissances: fields of knowledge]. It will have to ask about the relation that is able to have, on the one hand, between the different domains of knowledge [savoir] and, on the other hand, between knowledge and non-knowledge [savoir et non-savoir]” (570-1).

It seems to me that here you can see something like the Heideggerian distinction but applied in a totally different way.  There are at least three obvious differences.  One is the interest in current structures.  When Foucault comes to take on the “origin” question, the goal is to disperse it, not to find a singular origin.  The failure to disperse questions of origin is part of what he finds wrong with humanism. Foucault reads Feuerbach, for example, as stuck between the need to get man to his essence either as a return to an origin or as a fulfillment; both of those are teleological determinations.  Second, Foucault engages a range of contemporary sources, far beyond what Heidegger is willing to do.  Let’s just say it’s hard to imagine Heidegger sympathetically reading Russell and Wittgenstein!

Finally, of course, Foucault the historian wants to know how we got here on the anthropology question, and he doesn’t think that’s appropriately discovered by returning to the Greeks.  At the start of “Is man dead,” he even refers to the “temptation of the retrospective illusion” that writes humanism into the West, broadly conceived (568).  This is of course in radical distinction from Heidegger, who pushes his critique of the forgetting of being further and further back in history.

As early as QA, one can see pretty clearly the gap between Heideggerian interpretation and Foucault’s, because Foucault comments on Heidegger’s understanding of philosophical interpretation.  Foucault centers his reading on Heidegger’s famous comment that “We not only wish to but must understand the Greeks better than they understood themselves. Only thus shall we actually be in possession of our heritage” (Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 112; the German reads: “wir wollen nicht nur, sondern müssen die Griechen besser verstehen als sie sich selbst verstanden. Nur so besitzen wir das Erbe wirklich” (GA 24, 157); Foucault renders: “non seulement nous pouvons, mais nous devons comprendre les Grecs, mieux qu’ils ne se comprenaient eux-mêmes; et c’est de cette manière seulement que nous entrons en possession de leur héritage” (QA 208-209).  The difference between Hofstadter’s English and Foucault’s French is interesting and exploits and ambiguity in Heidegger: “das Erbe” is literally “the heritage,” i.e., it doesn’t say whose heritage.  It seems significant that Foucault distances this as “their” heritage.  One should also note Foucault’s highlighting of “devons” – emphasizing the ambiguity between necessity and obligation subtly ties Heidegger to the moral language Foucault associates with anthropology and existentialism.

On Foucault’s reading, Heideggerian interpretation:

“consists in leaving thought in the soil of its growth, leaving it grasped and kept in this earth [terre] which is closed over [refermée] its fundamental forgetting. Not to open the earth to examine the roots of a thought; but to scrutinize this closed earth where the core [noyau] of the night of a thought is enclosed.  The philosophical interpretation of a thought is not the speculation of an herbalist on the mysteries of its growth, it is an effective combat with the earth where it was born” (QA 210).

Language of roots and plants runs throughout the discussion.  A page earlier, Foucault noted that Heideggerian “commentary is not a travel story which only gives to the earth the sense of routes traveled; it ought instead to allow to thought its roots [racines] in the soil where it has sunk them; this is to allow it its place” (QA 209).  In different terms, interpretation is Gelassenheit.  That is, surpassing [dépassement] a thought is not effectuated by an oppositional literature, but when “we return to its originary truth, in the first soil of its beginning what, at the interior of a thought, has not been thought” (QA 210).

Heidegger, in other words, is rejecting the sorts of things that will feature in a genealogical account: the patient look into the roots and where and how they grew, the external factors that explains why a thought comes out the way it did, the soil conditions.  All of the effort is directed at the noyau – core, but also the seed.  All of the other stuff is a big pile of forgetting.

This is why:

“Heidegger’s interpretation is always presented as a return to the same. The commentary encounters the same thing as the text it explains. And if it says what is unsaid in the text, that’s not because it is hermeneutical, deciphering an unconscious of history, but to the extent that what is said in a work and what is unsaid are one and the same thing” (QA 210).

And where is all of this going?  “Philosophical interpretation shows how the destiny of being unfolds in a thought” (QA 211).

Needless to say, this is not Foucault.

5. Anthropology redux

So where does this leave us?  On Foucault’s argument, post-Kantian 19c philosophy remained stuck in the vacillation, first found in Kant, between critical philosophy and anthropology.  The problem, as noted above, is the subordination of the Kantian question about the conditions of possibility for truth to the conditions for the possibility of man’s truth.

That is, the post-Kantians tended to subordinate critical philosophy to anthropology, with the cost of being able to look at the structures that make experience possible.  “This imbrication of anthropological and critical themes characterizes 19c philosophy until phenomenology takes its departure from an anti-anthropologism, which it announces as an anti-psychologism” (QA 67). In the intervening years, “critique and anthropology belong to one another, in an unreflected unity” (QA 67).  One strand of thought takes the fourth Kantian question (“what is man”) into a general theory of representation; the other takes anthropology as an empirical science of man.  This “double polarity towards an abstract theory of representation and towards a naturalist critique” dominates until Husserl:

“The phenomenological breakthrough will be effectuated the day that Husserl avoids the fourth question, in investigating the sense of truth, in the name of and starting from truth itself, on the originary soil of true being [sur le sol originaire de l’être vrai] – and independently of man” (QA 69). 

This is 1954, but I think it gives a pretty good sense of where Foucault is going. For example, his introduction to Kant’s Anthropology (1960) is heavily mediated by the difficulty in reconciling anthropology and critical philosophy.  In the meantime, also in the early 1950s, he prepared extensive notes on phenomenology and psychology, including a very detailed reading of Husserl.  The breadth and detail of Foucault’s interests can be masked by his comments in the 1960s about structure and subject, where he tends to frame philosophy into two broad categories.  The 1950s work shows, at a minimum, that the reductive 1960s version was for rhetorical purposes.