Maxime

Lallement, MMU - CRMEP Kanthropology! conference, 19th-20th May 2016

The Role of Foucaults Reading of Kants Anthropology
Within his Critique of the Concept of Truth

In his Introduction to Kants Anthropology submitted as the second part of his doctoral thesis in
1961, Foucault claims that knowledge, in Kants Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view,
does not aim at a cosmological understanding but at a political and ethical use. Whilst Foucault
acknowledges a similarity in the themes studied in Kants essay On the Different Human Races
(1775) and in the Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view, Foucault stresses the fact that
their distribution is different. In the Essay, the two domains subjected to human knowledge (i.e.
nature and man) must be envisaged in a cosmological manner: both domains are part of a whole
which they constitute. But in the Anthropology, the knowledge of man serves a pragmatic
purpose: it aims at providing an understanding of a world in which men live together. It is the
anthropology which acquires a founding role towards a knowledge of man which has a place in
the world, rather than the knowledge of the world as a whole which gives equal importance to
the knowledge of man and the knowledge of nature. Foucault writes:

[] physical geography and anthropology are no longer set alongside one another as the
two symmetrical halves of the knowledge of the world articulated on the basis of an
opposition between man and nature; the task directing us toward a Weltkenntniss is
now the sole responsibility of an anthropology which encounters nature in no other
form that of an already habitable Earth (Erde). As a result, the notion of a cosmological
perspective that would organize geography and anthropology in advance and by rights,
serving as a single reference for both the knowledge of nature and of the knowledge of
man, would have to be put to one side to make room for a cosmopolitical perspective
with a programmatic value, in which the world is envisaged more as a republic to be
built than a cosmos given in advance. (Foucault: 2008, 33)

Maxime Lallement, MMU - CRMEP Kanthropology! conference, 19th-20th May 2016

As Foucault stresses it, the perspective of Kants Anthropology is pragmatic, which means that it
bears an ethico-political dimension towards the subject and others or towards the subject and a
world that is already given to and affected by others. Because Kants Anthropology distributes
the knowledge of man and of nature differently and reformulates their relationship, it does not
aim at determining what man is essence but what it can and must do within and towards a
broader political perspective.

As Foucault point it out, Kants Anthropology clearly distinguishes between inner sense and
apperception. Here again, Foucault differentiates the use of these two concepts in the
Anthropology and in the Critique of Pure Reason. Whereas in the Critique apperception gets
reduced to the thinking subject, it keeps in the Anthropology the slightly wider meaning of the
activity of the subject. The same goes for the concept of inner sense which in the Critique is
understood on the basis of time as a priori condition of experience but retains in the
Anthropology the wider meaning of a Gedankenspiel literally a game of thought -, a
transaction between the subject who feels and the world which affects him. Foucault writes:

In the Anthropology, Kant Is also careful to distinguish between inner sense and
apperception. The one is defined as consciousness of what man does; the other as
consciousness of what he feels. These definitions overlap with those of the Critique, but
there is nevertheless a difference. Apperception, which in the Critique is reduced to the
simplicity of an I think, is here related to the originary activity of the subject, while
inner sense which in the Critique was analysed on the basis of the a priori of time is
given here in the primitive diversity of a Gedankenspiel that operates beyond the
mastery of the subject, and which makes of inner sense more the sign of an initial
passivity than a constituting activity. (Foucault: 2008, 37)

Maxime Lallement, MMU - CRMEP Kanthropology! conference, 19th-20th May 2016

The focus on the pragmatic dimension of Kants Anthropology, which Foucault stresses several
times in his introduction to the text, appears here quite clearly. The fact that inner sense and
apperception are not reducible to a subject who encounters the world within a strict
epistemological perspective provides a space for an ethico-political relationship of the subject
towards himself, others and the world.

The nuance Foucault introduces by stressing the shift of emphasis from the Critique to the
Anthropology regarding the question of the objects of knowledge and the question of their
possible emergence for a subject (i.e. the question of the distribution of the knowledge of nature
and man and the question of the redefinition of inner sense and apperception) shows two
decisive aspects of the Anthropology as a pragmatic enterprise and not a strictly epistemological
one. On the one hand, Foucault argues that Kant is concerned with the political question of what
man can and ought to do as a member of an already existing cosmopolitical world rather than
with the question of the definition of an anthropological essence in naturalist terms. Foucault
writes:

It was not the aim of the anthropological thinking to bring an end to the definition of a
human Wesen in naturalist terms. [] Anthropology is no longer interested in finding
out how man can be used, but what can be expected of him. Moreover, it will
investigate what man can and should make (kann und soll) of himself. (Foucault: 2008,
51-52)

What Foucault tries to avoid, in the 1961 text, is the alienation of a subject of action in an abstract
object of knowledge and it is within the space of this irreducibility that the reflection developed
in the last chapters of the Order of Things comes from with the description of the empirico-

Maxime Lallement, MMU - CRMEP Kanthropology! conference, 19th-20th May 2016

transcendental doublet according to which man becomes both the subject and the object of his
own knowledge. In chapter 9 of The Order of Things, Foucault tells us that the emergence of
modern anthropology puts the knowing subject in a paradoxical position whereby the limits of
mans knowledge are conditioned by his own finitude as a living being. Foucault writes:

[] the threshold of our modernity is situated not by the attempt to apply objective
methods to the study of man, but rather by the constitution of an empiricotranscendental doublet which was called man. (Foucault: 2001, 347)

It clearly appears that without the shift Foucault introduces between the Critique of Pure Reason
and the Anthropology which allows the question of the possibility of knowledge to be
subordinated to the ethico-political question of what man can and should do, it would be
impossible to problematize the alienation which occurs when the knowing subject becomes an
object of his own knowledge.

This tension is already present at the beginning of Foucaults Introduction when he underlines
that the duplicity of the acting and knowing subject is not reduced to a doubling of that subject
but corresponds rather to a double consciousness of the subject. Foucault writes:

[] we should bear in mind that what is in question is not a doppeltes Ich, but a
doppeltes Bewusstsein dieses Ich. Thus, the I preserves its unity, and if, at times, it
presents itself to consciousness as something perceived and, at others, in the form of
judgement, this is because it is self-affecting; being, in one and the same gesture, both
das bestimmende Subjekt and das sich selbst bestimmende Subjekt. In this way, a
sensibility irreducible to understanding manages to avert the danger of the division of
the subject. (Foucault: 2008, 38)

Maxime Lallement, MMU - CRMEP Kanthropology! conference, 19th-20th May 2016

Here again, the primacy Foucault gave to anthropology as an ethico-political questioning
regarding what man can and should do at the beginning of his Introduction reappears. The
anthropological fold introduces a paradoxical situation whereby the subject who acts, speaks and
knows himself is always already determined by a true discourse which he supposedly carries on
manifesting as he lives.

The problematic relationship between what is pre-given to the subject and the transformative
role of ones experience and actions is a guiding thread within Foucaults own philosophical
enterprise. Whether we consider the concept of historical a priori which, in The Archaeology of
Knowledge, is distinguished from the historical emergence and repetition of statements, the
concept of quasi-transcendental developed in the last chapters of The Order of Things which
shows that human existence is irreducible to the a priori truth derived from the positivity of
human sciences or later, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, where the speaking
subject who confesses is taken to be revealing the truth of his yet secret desires, it is clearly the
question of the sovereignty of the subject that Foucault tried to formulate as early as the second
piece of work he produced for his Doctorat dEtat. In it, Foucault argues that what is taken to
operate a priori in the Critique of Pure Reason is, regarding concrete existence, originary: it does
not precede existence ontologically but appears to be always already there because of its
sedimentation in the way in which the world is understood. Foucault writes:

Thus, the structure of the relationship between the given and the a priori in
Anthropology is the opposite of that revealed in the Critique. The a priori, in the order
of knowledge, becomes, in the order of concrete existence, an originary which is not
chronologically first, but which, having appeared in the succession of figures of the

Maxime Lallement, MMU - CRMEP Kanthropology! conference, 19th-20th May 2016

synthesis, reveals itself as already there; on the other hand, that which, in the order of
knowledge, is a pure given, is in the reflection on concrete existence, lit up by muted
lights which give it the depth of the already occurred. (Foucault: 2008, 68)

In order to be able to redefine the meaning of the a priori, Foucault needs to provide the concept
of originary with a historical dimension. Contrary to the a priori, the originary is not what
precedes human experience and provides its conditions of possibility but what appears in it
covered by the veil of evidence. This torsion of the concept of a priori present in the Critique of
Pure Reason constitutes an attack of the concept of transcendental itself which is the reason
why Foucault reduces it to a quasi notion in The Order of Things. Hence, what appears as a
given in the order of knowledge has a historical point of emergence that needs to be uncovered
beyond the evidence of what is already there and this is what Foucaults genealogy endeavours
to do.

Hence, the last question of the series formulated by Kant in his lectures on logic (Was ist der
Mensch?) does not reduce man to a biological positivity that could be grasped through the
positivity of scientific knowledge. This question, which should be understood in relation to the
preceding ones (What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for?). The last question
cannot, according to Foucault, occupy a founding and architectonic position for it is entirely
dependent upon the other ones. The questioning about the being of man is first of all a question
related to the meaning and the possibility of its existence within a cosmopolitical context.
Foucault writes:

Maxime Lallement, MMU - CRMEP Kanthropology! conference, 19th-20th May 2016

The very content of the question Was ist der Mensch? cannot inhere in an originary
autonomy, for man immediately defines himself as a citizen of the world, as
Weltbewohner []. And, completing the circle, all reflection on man involves reflection
on the world. However, at issue here is not the naturalist perspective where a science
of man implies a knowledge of nature. What is in question are not the determinations,
on the level of phenomena, in which the human animal is caught and defined; rather, it
is the development of self-awareness and of the I am: the subject self-affecting by the
movement in which he becomes aware of himself as an object. [] It is in the
implications of the I am that the world is discovered as the figure of this movement
through which the self, in becoming an object, takes its place in the field of experience
and finds there a concrete system of belonging. The world thus revealed is therefore not
the Physis, nor the realm of the validity of laws. (Foucault: 2008, 78-79)

There is a sense in which the anthropological question, as defined by Foucault, answers and
completes the first one. The question about what the subject can know is no longer determined
by a positive understanding of the subject and the world as a natural being amongst a natural
environment, but the question of what the subject can know of the place he occupies as a subject
(and therefore also as an object) in a world (i.e. in a set of relations with others in this world).

It is not surprising that Foucaults essay What is Critique?, pronounced at the Socit franaise
de Philosophie on 27th May 1978, mentions Kants 1784 essay Was ist Aufklrung? and the
specific way in which Kant defines Enlightenment in this text. In his essay, Foucault writes:

he [Kant] defined the Aufklrung in relation to a certain minority, condition in which
humanity was maintained and maintained in an authoritative way. Second, he defined
this minority as characterized by a certain incapacity in which humanity was maintained,
an incapacity to use its own understanding precisely without something which would be
someone elses directions. (Foucault: 1996, 32-33)

We see that Kants description of the Enlightenment corresponds to a certain use of knowledge
and to a use of knowledge which will help modify and shape both the place one occupies in the
world and the relationships one establishes with others. Here again, we find a reminiscence of

Maxime Lallement, MMU - CRMEP Kanthropology! conference, 19th-20th May 2016

the anthropological question understood from a cosmopolitcal point of view: it is my knowledge
and the use I make of it which allows to modify my actions in the world and the horizon of my
world, hence what it means to be a man in possessing a certain knowledge and taken within a
net of power relations. It is the question of the limits of the subjects knowledge which allows
him to modify his place within the world and to move away from a state of domination. It is this
very activity that Foucault, later in the same essay, will call critique. He writes:

[] do you know up to what point you can know? Reason as much as you want, but do
you really know up to what point you can reason without it becoming dangerous?
Critique will say, in short, that it is not so much a matter of what we are undertaking,
more or less courageously, than it is the idea we have of our knowledge and its limits.
Our liberty is at stake and consequently, instead of letting someone else say obey, it
is at this point, once one has gotten an adequate idea of ones own knowledge and its
limits, that the principle of autonomy can be discovered. One will then no longer have
to hear the obey; or rather, the obey will be founded on autonomy itself. (Foucault:
1996, 35)

The role of the critique is therefore not simply to determine the limits of epistemology, but to
find out the point at which a use of knowledge can move from the field of positivity to the one
of ethico-political action towards the self and others. In this sense, the critical use of knowledge
comes after the anthropological question itself: it is not the knowledge of the essence or of the
nature of man which produces a true discourse about what he is, but rather the question about
the meaning of the existence of man at a point where what one knows has a concrete effect upon
the relations in which one is taken with others and the world.
It is therefore not a surprise that the question of the meaning of critique and Enlightenment
reappears later in Foucaults penultimate lecture course at the Collge de France. During the 5th

January 1983 lecture, Foucault explains that the question of the meaning of the Aufklrung asked

Maxime Lallement, MMU - CRMEP Kanthropology! conference, 19th-20th May 2016

by Kant in his 1784 text is first of all the question of a philosopher asking about the meaning of
the present in which he lives and the way in which the knowledge he has of this present moment
may affect or serve to change the present in which he lives. Foucault writes:
[...] it seems to me that in this text by Kant we see the appearance of the question of the
present as a philosophical event to which the philosopher who speaks of it belongs. [...]
It seems to me that philosophy as the surface of emergence of a present reality, as a
questioning of the philosophical meaning of the present reality of which it is a part, and
philosophy as the philosophers questioning of this we to which he belongs and in
relation to which he has to situate himself, is a distinctive feature of philosophy as a
discourse of modernity and on modernity. (Foucault: 2010, 12, 13)
The question of the emergence of the present as a philosophical event is precisely that which
allows to question the primacy of the truth of judgment which proceeds from an epistemological
understanding of man and the world.
If the anthropological and critique of knowledge questions were simultaneous in the
Anthropology, it would not be possible to understand how the use of knowledge could play a
pragmatic role, a role which allows to uproot the primacy of truth and identity conveyed by the
synthesis of judgment by showing what occurs in experience is not transcendentally
predetermined but is an effect of the irreducible dispersion of experience itself. As Foucault
writes:
The time of the Critique, a form of intuition and inner sense, presents the multiplicity of
the given only through a constructive activity that is already at work; it gives diversity,
but as already contained in the unity of the I think. In contrast, the time of the
Anthropology is assured by a dispersion which cannot be contained, for it is no longer
that of given and passive sensibility. [...] In the Critique, time made itself transparent to
a synthetic activity which was not in itself temporal, because it was constitutive; in the
Anthropology, time, mercilessly dispersed, serves to obscure, rendering the synthetic
acts impenetrable, and swaps the sovereignty of the Bestimmung for the patient, brittle
uncertainty under threat from an exercise called Kunst. (Foucault: 2008, 89, 90)

Maxime Lallement, MMU - CRMEP Kanthropology! conference, 19th-20th May 2016

The use of the word Kunst, which refers to art and artifice, should attract our attention when
thinking about Foucault last two volumes of the History of Sexuality. In these volumes, the ethical
question of managing an aesthetics of existence and of conducting ones life as a work of art is
prevalent. More precisely, it is important to take into account the fact that the possibility of an
art of existence relies upon a modified relationship towards others and the world which proceeds
from a different use of knowledge and its dissociation from the primacy of the truth of judgment.
Whereas the first volume of the History of Sexuality describes how confession in the 18th century
seeks to produce an equation between the words of the subject and the truth of his nature (i.e.
a certain kind of Bestimmung), the examination of the arts of existence in the second and third
volume of the History of Sexuality insists upon the regulation of codified relationships between
individuals which are not pre-inscribed in the truth of knowledge but in a carefully adjusted
regulation which looks very much like a pragmatic concern. Foucault writes:
No doubt Kant had all of this in mind when, in the Preface to the Anthropology, he states
as his object what man makes of himself [...]. Treating man as a freihandelndes Wesen,
the Anthropology uncovers a whole zone of free-exchange, where man trades his
second-hand freedoms, connecting with others by way of an unspoken and and
uninterrupted commerce which ensures that he is at home anywhere on earth.
(Foucault: 2008, 44)
This idea of commerce and negotiation within the shared place that the world is corresponds to
the definition of anthropology as exploration of an experience which can never be completely
synthetized under the scope of judgement. In this sense, it shows that anthropology, is always in
excess of the positive and fixed forms the knowledge of man can take. It refers to an experience
which is, as Foucault reminds us:

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Maxime Lallement, MMU - CRMEP Kanthropology! conference, 19th-20th May 2016

[...] an Erforschung: an exploration of an ensemble never graspable in its totality, never
at rest, because always taken up in a movement where nature and freedom are bound
up in the Gebrauch one of the meanings of which is given in the word usage.
(Foucault: 2008, 51)
It is enough for now to remember that the word usage is used by Foucault in the title of the
second volume of the History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasures (LUsage des Plaisirs), which
offers a good example of Gebrauch. By putting the question of eroticism within a different
historical context, Foucault provides an excellent example of a use of knowledge which does not
produce an a priori synthesis of experience. Indeed, by showing that eroticism corresponded, in
Greco-Roman Antiquity, to the question of the use of pleasure rather than the manifestation of
the truth of sexuality, Foucault provides a critique which puts our present into question and lets
the possibility of different relationships between individuals appear: it provides a pragmatic
account which differs from the one delivered by modern positivism.

References:
Foucault, M. (1996). What is Critique? In J. Schmidt (Ed.), What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-
Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Philosophical Traditions) (pp. 2361).
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Foucault, M. (2010). Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France 1982- 1983.
United States: Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, M. (2001). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. London:
Routledge.

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Maxime Lallement, MMU - CRMEP Kanthropology! conference, 19th-20th May 2016

Foucault, M., Nigro, R., Briggs, K., & Bove, A. (2008). Introduction to Kants anthropology from a
pragmatic point of view. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), Los Angeles.
Kant, I., & Young, M. J. (1992). Lectures on Logic. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

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