Kant with Foucault: Enlightenment and the historical a priori
Abstract
In his late writings Foucault proposed an interpretation of Kant which gives him a privileged place in history of philosophy as the pioneer of our modernity. Foucault’s opponents (Fraser, Habermas, etc.) took this as the evidence of the shortcomings of his earlier criticism of Kant, as well as of modernity. Foucault himself mostly insisted on the differences between the Kantian Critique and his own research. The aim of the article is to correct, by considering the Foucauldian notion of the „historical a priori“, the thesis of Foucault’s critics as well as his own self-understanding. Foucault’s attempt, in The Order of Things, to present Kant as the initiator of the modern épistémè of man, marked by confusions between the empirical and the transcendental, is liable to criticism. In addition to this, some themes of the Kantian Critique, such as the contingency of human faculties of knowledge, the definition of knowledge in terms of the relationship between the „visible“ and the „sayable“ and, more generally, the question of the limits of knowledge, have had a deep impact on Foucault. On the other hand, Foucault’s critics have failed to notice that Foucault deliberately rejected the Kantian investigation of the conditions of possibility of „true knowledge“ in order to secure his own historical research of the conditions of existence of factual knowledge and of the possible transgression of its limits. In a similar vein, in his unconventional interpretation of Kant’s essay on Enlightenment, Foucault distances himself from the universalist tendencies of Kant’s philosophy and emphasizes the motifs of courage, individual autonomy and resistance to authority present in the Kantian motto: „Dare to use your own understanding!“
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