In the development of the child, the passage from minority to majority is figured by another stage: learning to walk. Having the courage and audacity to know is having the ability to walk alone.
Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction from another. [. . .] It is so comfortable to be a minor! If I have a book that understands for me, a spiritual advisor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who decides upon a regimen for me, and so forth, I need not trouble myself at all.21
There follows the image of walking:
Precepts and formulas, those mechanical instruments of a rational use, or rather misuse, of his natural endowments, are the ball and chain of an everlasting minority. And anyone who did throw them off would still make only an uncertain leap over even the narrowest ditch, since he would not be accustomed to free movement of this kind. Hence there are only a few who have succeeded, by their own cultivation of their spirit, in extricating themselves from minority and yet walking confidently.22
This need for maturation, self-differentiation, and the development of the subject’s autonomy authorizes Foucault to see Kant’s article as a text that “is located in a sense at the crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history,”23 and to argue that it is certainly not a “minor” text. By defining the urgency of the revolutionary moment in thought and by defining the Enlightenment as the historical decision to find a “way out,” an “exit” from tradition and authority, Kant inscribes, for the first time, the question of philosophical time in critical philosophy itself. The present is the meeting point between structural permanence and the historical specificity of the transcendental structure. An epicenter. The day, today, thus marks the date and moment in the a priori. Foucault writes:
It is in the reflection on “today” as difference in history and as motive for a particular philosophical task that the novelty of this text appears to me to lie. And, by looking at it in this way, it seems to me we may recognize a point of departure: the outline of what one might call the attitude of modernity.24
The epigenetic malleability of thought already expresses the imperative for the self-transformation of modern humans that Foucault sees at work in Baudelaire, whom he claims prolongs and realizes the Kantian definition of the Enlightenment:
Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not “liberate man in his own being”; it compels him to face the task of producing himself.25
Genealogy and Archeology
Foucault’s analysis is especially interesting insofar as it appears to break decisively with the genetic inquiry against Kant himself that his readers undertake to bring him back to the source, to the “focus” of the transcendental. Initially the revelation of the historical dimension of the transcendental is a turn back towards a new sort of origin, which, as we know, Foucault first called genealogy then archeology. Genealogy and archeology are not the same as the reconstitution of a genesis. Rather, they attempt to locate the rational, starting from a failure of essential foundation, one which, far from appearing as a lack or fault, instead characterizes the structure of all foundation in general. As Foucault writes in his article “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” “If the genealogist refuses to extend his faith in metaphysics, if he listens to history,” what does he learn? “He finds that there is ‘something altogether different’ behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence.”26
Clearly, it is possible to read this article alongside “What Is Enlightenment?” Indeed, both texts again present the idea that the absence of a foundation is a resource, not a lack. Moreover, it is perhaps the resource of absence that defines the transcendental. In the article on Nietzsche, Foucault emphasizes the difference between the German terms Ursprung, Herkunft, and Entstehung, all of which refer to origin. While Ursprung refers to origin in the sense of foundation, which here I have named focus, Herkunft and Entstehung refer rather to the provenance and arising that start from the absence of foundation. It is thus these two terms that “are more exact than Ursprung in recording the true objective of genealogy.”27 Contrary to all expectations, it is a matter of thinking the origin, starting from that which did not “impos[e] a predetermined form on all its vicissitudes.”28 It seems that finally here we have found exposed the motif of the epicenter and the “surface,” defined as “the inscribed surface of events.”29
Genealogy, which appears as the specifically Foucauldian version of epigenesis, thus proceeds starting from a divided origin, a network of forces, disparate instances of “an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers.”30 This uneven and discontinuous formation also refers to an understanding of Entstehung as “arising” at the surface, as a source that reveals no secret or underground focus: “Entstehung designates emergence, the moment of arising. It stands as the principle and the singular law of an apparition.”31 Appearance without a hidden structure. Thus, genealogy “is not the erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself.”32
The End of the Order of Genetic Derivation?
But will we really manage a satisfactory determination of what an epigenetic transcendental might be, one that would allow us to return to our initial problem and situate the categorial agreement as it should be, proceeding in fact from a foundation to the surface? Is the transcendental itself, genealogically and archeologically reread and redeveloped, really freed from the inquiry into its genesis?
In a sense, it seems that this is the case. The great singularity of Foucault’s reading derives from the upheaval to which it subjects the agreement of categories with experience. Indeed, it is no longer, we understand, a matter of thinking the concordance of transcendental structures and objects, but rather one of asserting the possibility of constituting the transcendental itself as an object of experience. The end of “What Is Enlightenment?” certainly unearths the conditions of possibility of an experimental philosophy:
[T]his historico-critical attitude must also be an experimental one. I mean that this work done at the limits of ourselves must, on the one hand, open up a realm of historical inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where the change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take.33
The archeo-genealogical critique “will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.”34 Foucault explains that, henceforth, “criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying.”35 There would therefore be no more essential difference between the idea of formal structure and that of historical metamorphosis.
Still, does Foucault manage to bring to light a true historico-critical malleability of the transcendental?
The Two A Priori
It’s far more complicated. In reality, and by contrast, a new rigidity of the transcendental comes of Foucault’s claim regarding its transformability. Let me explain. Foucault’s relation to the transcendental is not as clear and unambiguous as implied above. Indeed, in other texts prior to “What Is Enlightenment?” but that were never subsequently refuted, Foucault simultaneously retains and rejects the need to allow for a transcendental framework for thinking. On the one hand, he recognizes that there is no knowledge without “a play of form that anticipates all contents insofar as they have already rendered them possible.”36 These forms, “anterior to all explicit acts, to all concret
e manipulations, to all given contents,” establish “the unity of a science defined by a system of formal requisites and a world defined as the horizon of all possible experiences.”37 On the other hand, he rejects this necessity, as can be seen very clearly, for example, in a 1972 interview in which he says: “In all my work I strive [. . .] to avoid any reference to [the] transcendental as a condition for possibility for any knowledge.”38
The categories and other so-called “pure” structures are tributaries of discursive formations and are “molded by a great many distinct regimes.”39 So, contrary to what he says in “What Is Enlightenment?,” Foucault also states that the transcendental and history reject each other. From the time of The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), he came to distinguish two a priori, the “formal a priori” and the “historical a priori.” The formal a priori retains its definition as condition of possibility, while the historical a priori makes it possible to account for the transformation of objects of discourse and discourse itself, and consequently also their formal framework. Foucault writes that by “historical a priori, what I mean [. . .] is an a priori that is not a condition of validity for judgments, but a condition of reality for statements.”40 Later he continues:
[T]he reason for using this rather barbarous term [historical a priori] is that this a priori must take account of statements in their dispersion, in all the flaws opened up by their non-coherence, in their overlapping and mutual replacement, in their simultaneity, which is not unifiable, and in their succession, which is not deductible; in short, it has to take account of the fact that discourse has not only a meaning or a truth, but a history [. . .].41
There is, therefore, not as much unity between the transcendental structure, with its timeless purity, and the historical dissemination of its effects as Foucault himself asks us to believe.
It is certainly necessary to acknowledge a reciprocal action for rules and facts that destines the “agreement” between categories and objects of experience to be, in some ways, a constant decision, in the present. A permanent negotiating point must be acknowledged between the formal a priori, “whose jurisdiction extends without contingence,”42 and the historical a priori.
At the same time, there is also a separation between form and history in Foucault. He recognizes this very early on: “The formal a priori and the historical a priori neither belong to the same level nor share the same nature: if they intersect, it is because they occupy two different dimensions.”43 Foucault versus Foucault! If the split of the a priori should not be envisaged as a frank rupture, a mysterious “syncopation,” or a mere “play of intermittent forms”44 – as if the formal a priori were “additionally” endowed with a history – then a rift must be seen between them, a difference in level, in short, a lack of coincidence.
The problem posed by this cut between the two a priori derives from the fact that it remains unexplained and inexplicable. Above all, it introduces a new hierarchy, with one of the two a priori becoming more “fundamental” than the other depending on the context – all of which surreptitiously reinscribes the possibility of genesis and dismantles the epicentric structure of discourse that we thought had finally been acknowledged.
Foucault, too, does in fact appear to relinquish the transcendental from the start by dividing it. We can’t really say that “What Is Enlightenment?,” which was written fifteen years after The Archaeology of Knowledge, really corrects and modifies his conclusions. Actually, in “What Is Enlightenment?”, Foucault ultimately declares that the “new” criticism, “genealogical in its design and archeological in its method,” is “not transcendental.”45 But it is not the mere return of the skeptic’s circle that is the most astonishing here. What is most surprising is that what may appear to be a hesitation, an opposing position, in Foucault’s uncertainty with regard to the transcendental paradoxically produced the dominant definition of the transcendental in twentieth-century continental philosophy.
The Transcendental as a Residuum
Let me explain. Foucault says that he does everything to “avoid” having recourse to the transcendental. That he “historicize[s it] to the utmost.” That the two levels of the a priori – the formal and the historical – are discontinuous and impossible to adjust. But then, in the 1972 interview cited above, he adds:
When I say that I strive to avoid it, I don’t mean that I am sure of succeeding. [. . .] I try to historicize to the utmost to leave as little space as possible to the transcendental. I cannot exclude the possibility that one day I will have to confront an irreducible residuum which will be, in fact, the transcendental.46
In the last resort, having considered the possibilities of experimenting with, historicizing, or avoiding the transcendental, Foucault ultimately proposes a minimal definition that jams the cogs as they move towards a break. The transcendental is defined as a residuum, that is, as something that it is impossible to evacuate entirely. While Foucault’s critical position questions the value of universality and the necessity of the conditions of possibility of cognition and thinking in Kant’s work, and while it breaks the continuity between formal and historical structures, it still retains the irreducible nature of the transcendental. A residual definition itself on which continental philosophers would generally agree. The transcendental could lose the technical meaning it has in Kant, it could even lose its status of formal structure, of logical anteriority: it is what resists, what cannot be reduced. Again, this irreducibility is the other name for meaning. In the end, the difference between criticism and skepticism lies in the support of “critical” philosophers – that is, actually the majority of continental philosophers – for the residual existence of meaning as that which does not allow itself to be assimilated to any empirical determination, especially biological determinations. Of course, we have seen that the mind leaving its state of minority is presented as a maturation. All the same, this question of age and growth does not imply any organic definition of the mind. Biology without body. Body without organs.
But after all, what’s the problem? Why would we not be satisfied with this definition of the transcendental as irreducible? Quite simply because the assertion of the irreducibility of meaning is merely postulated, never deduced. What do we call irreducible? Who could ever answer? And what exactly is irreducible since Foucault says, moreover, that any formal structure is subject to different modes of historical and experimental transformation? We’ll never know. The residuum has no reason. Hence the “irreducible” appears as the new aspect of a presupposed, preformed instance that contradicts the economy of transformability in which it is supposed to be inscribed. The entire development of “What Is Enlightenment?” regarding the present and history is accompanied by the assertion of the irreducible’s character as being outside of time. By definition, irreducibility cannot change; it remains what it is; it forms a bar of principled resistance that does not develop, does not differentiate itself, an identitarian rock without formation that resists all experimentation and presides over all the historical occurrences of its subjects, of its “us.” In this sense, it is incompatible with the whole idea of epigenesis.
Notes
1. “What Is Critique?” in Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, eds Sylvère Lotringer and Catherine Porter, trans. Lysa Hochroth, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1997, pp. 23–82. Lecture given to the French Society of Philosophy on May 27, 1978 and published in Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, vol. LXXXIV, 1990, pp. 35–63.
2. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” This text is available both in The Foucault Reader (pp. 32–50) and in The Politics of Truth (pp. 7–20). I refer here primarily to Catherine Porter’s version in the former volume. The second version of “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières ?” was published in Magazine littéraire, no. 207, May 1984, pp. 35–9 (extract from the lecture at the Collège de France, January 5, 1983) and published in English as “What Is Revolution?” in The Politics of Truth, pp. 83–100.
3. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the
Question: What Is Enlightenment?”in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 15–22.
4. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” p. 32.
5. Foucault asks: “What is happening today? What is happening right now?” in “What is Revolution?,” p. 84.
6. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchell, New York: Picador, 2006,p. 15.
7. This is also the central theme in The Hermeneutics of the Subject. See especially pp. 15ff.
8. “What Is Enlightenment?,” p. 50.
9. “What Is Enlightenment?,” p. 34.
10. “What Is Enlightenment?,” p. 38.
11. Cf. The Hermeneutics of the Subject, pp. 15–19.
12. “What Is Enlightenment?,” p. 35.
13. “What Is Enlightenment?,” p. 44.
14. “What Is Revolution?,” p. 85.
15. “What Is Revolution?,” p. 84.
16. “What Is Revolution?,” p. 85.
17. “What Is Revolution?,” p. 85.
18. “What Is Enlightenment?,” p. 48.
Before Tomorrow- Epigenesis and Rationality Page 17