This was asserted by Kant: “I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with the objects as with the mode of our knowledge [emphasis added] of objects insofar [emphasis added] as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori.” [KS, CPR pp. 59] Kant’s concern is if we interpret this correctly, the possibility of pure a priori mode of knowing things. What in fact supplies this possibility? Elsewhere, Kant writes: “Conjunctio of a manifold in general can never [emphasis added] come to us through senses [i.e. sensibility], and cannot therefore be contained in the pure form of sensible intuition [KS, CPR S15 pp. 151].” The combination of the manifold of intuitions, the coherence and order of anything in other words, cannot be pregiven (with coherence) to us (the subject). In fact, Kant cannot put it in a more succinct way when he says: “being an act of the self subjectivity of the subject, it cannot be executed save by the subject itself.” This implies directly that for Kant, it is the subject who attempts this rearrangement and reordering of the manifold intuitions and give it its coherent form. Following this, what must be implied is then that the subject itself makes all modes of knowledge possible. The locus of the “possible a priori” lies not in the exteriority but in the subject. In S17 of the Transcendental Deduction (B) Kant writes:
“The first pure knowledge of understanding, then, upon which all the rest of its employment is based, and which also at the same time is completely independent of all conditions of sensible intuition is the principle of the original synthetic unity of apperception... the mere form of outer sensible intuition, space is not yet by itself knowledge; it [merely] supplies only the manifold of a priori intuition for a possible knowledge.” [KS, CPR pp. 156]
This “first pure knowledge of understanding” or “original synthetic unity of apperception [in the subject],” is reductively, Kant’s “I” or “I think.” It is the pure simple representation that conjoins synthetically with all representations given to us so that it becomes “our representations” or in other words, so that I can say that all these representations are a) my representations and b) that I am conscious of them. This “I” in short, for our purposes, is then the highest (S17 “Supreme Principle of all Employment of the Understanding”).
For Kant, this “transcendental I”, is an a priori, necessary character for all possible knowledge. It is as Foucault interprets it a “nature in human nature” [pp. 122] but whose fundamental form for Foucault is not the transcendental “I think.” That the source of all possible knowledge lies in the “I think” but not in the empiricity, exteriority, “structural relationship to...” is an illusion. Foucault writes this very interesting paragraph where he defines the illusion as finitude [pp. 122]. This illusion = finitude that Foucault seems to me to be referring to is the originary transcendental “I think” being the source of all possible knowledge a priori and thus that the subject (“I think”) is finite. Foucault then says that this illusion = finitude [is] 1) the retreat of truth 2) that in which truth hides and 3) that in which truth can always be found [pp. 122]. By invoking the term “truth,” Foucault is implying that Kant’s originary “I” is false. If we recognize this illusion, that the subject is finite and thus cannot as an a priori simple analytic representation hold all synthetic predicates, Foucault thinks that it will signify a “retreat” of this false truth and we can find the real “truth.” Foucault’s truth and Foucault through his hybrid of Archaeology-geneaological approach is an attestment to the third point 3) that truth can always be found.
The question then becomes, what is Foucault’s truth? And how is this truth revealed? Where can we find this truth? Here, I explore several paragraphs that can give us a clue as to what is Foucault’s truth.
1) To this, we can begin with pp. 63 where he writes of a movement which in [emphasis added] the Critique, gave rise to the transcendental mirage (or obscurity; illusion) and that this mirage is prolonged (perhaps better understood as manifest) in Kant’s Anthropology in the form of [emphasis added] the empirical (concrete life of the Gemut i.e. mind of the subject).
2) The world. The world is for Foucault is “given in a system of actuality which envelops all existence [pp. 80]” He takes that even in Kant’s Opus Postumum, Kant admits this. That the Inbegriff i.e. concept of the world is this very complex of existence. Existence develops its concrete reality on the basis of the world or in other words, the world is the root of existence, the source containing existence. Foucault’s conception of the world can be derived from his own methodology that I may explore further later. But the last sentence strikes me as important. This “world” manages to a) retain existence and b) set existence free [pp. 80]. The world retains a) the Foucauldian truth of existence in the complex of actual relations and b) can liberate the subject-as-itself-object to the status of the pure subject “I think” the originary source of the world, free from its Foucauldian real existence-in-the-world. Foucault writes this in such a manner: “The possible is thinkable only from within a given system of actuality and the plurality of worlds is only ever seen from the standpoint of the existing world and whatever available experience we have of it [pp. 81].” That we can conceive of the world independent of the subject for Foucault is impossible. It always have to a) retain its existence in the system of actuality. From the latter only can we postulate of us giving teleological possibilities to the world.
The world (as a complex of being; system; structure) appears as or on a 3 way structure 1) source – Quellen 2) domain - Umfang 3) limit - Grenzen.
3) Foucault then says that the question posed in the Anthropology, Was ist der Mensch? (the nature of human beings) repeated as 1) What can I know/The sources of human knowledge 2. The extent of the possible and natural use of every knowledge/The domain of the natural and possible use of knowledge 3) What may I hope for/the limits of Reason. These same anthropological question 1) 2) 3) “are repeated” toward which the repetition itself is directed [pp. 83]. Prior to this, Focault says, “Anthropology says nothing other than what is said in the critique [pp. 83.]” Hence, combining these two sentences, what Foucault wants to say is that whatever is in Kant’s early works of the Anthropology (questions asked and sought for there of human nature) is a repetition. They are repeated in the Critiques. But more importantly, this repetition is already directed to the Critique. Quellen, Umfang, and Grenzen appear in their own right as a set of questions, repeated. By virtue of being repeated from Anthropology-Critique, it takes on an independent common form of the relation of man and the world as though it can be seen apart from the world-structure.
This newly liberated independent form then reattaches itself or correlates itself to “what belongs to it necessarily and originarily” i.e. the “I.” “The man” from which the root of the existence of things emerges. “The man,” in fact, the nature of this man takes on this independent form (the repetition of 1) 2) 3)).
4) The function of the question “What is man” is to give a structure, a fundamental cohesion to the tripartite divisions of the Critique (sensibility, understanding, reason; pure reason, practical reason, faculty of judgment) which Foucault writes as “more radical than any possible faculty” and which I interpret as purer and more basic than any faculty. Purer (a priori) for this is what belies, preceeds or is the very condition [emphasis added] of the liberation of transcendental philosophy i.e. the possibility of all knowledge i.e. “the I.”
5) Foucault seems to me to also want to say another thing. That the Anthropology is marginal to Critique yet is the basis of the Critique. It is the Critique’s empiricity. For Foucault, there exists a “true meaning” of Kant’s Anthropology to be found in its divisions or description of itself as 1) Systematic and 2) Popular.
6) 1) Systematic. Anthropology a) forms a systematic coherent whole of knowledge of man. B) This coherence of such a systematicity of the knowledge of man is borrowed from the whole of the Critical enterprise. C) Anthropology itself is a dispersion of the synthetic activity of the “I.” “[The “I”] is mercilessly dispersed, [insertion: it] serves to obscure, rendering the synthetic acts impenetrable.” (as opposed to the Critique where time is transparent to the synthetic activity constitutive in the subject, the “I”) [pp. 90].
Kunst is defined by Foucault as the fact according to which nothing is ever given without being at the same time exposed to dangers of an undertaking i.e. the undertaking that serves to a) grounds something in construction and b) hurl it into its arbitrary. This is to me vague. But Foucault goes on talking about the Kunst as a 1) construction of an illusion on top of and facing the phenomenon (Erscheinung) – the illusion of plenitude and meaningful phenomenon. It gives the sensible intuitions a mask of illusion. The Anthropology (wholly empirical, nothing transcendental) is for Foucault a dispersion of time (temporal dispersion) in all the manifold intuition or relations Beziehung auf [pp. 92]. This temporal dispersion “reveals” a “relationship to...” or i.e. the “truth” and real “freedom.” This temporal dispersion has no end and no beginning [pp. 92] and it is just the 1) “always already there” and (but) 2) “never entirely given. Time envelops anthropology and the first origins is unknown. But this for Foucault, is the “true meaning.” He says “It is not that the problem of the origin is unknown to it; on the contrary, it gives the problem back its true meaning [pp. 92].” This true meaning does not need to be a first original time [pp. 92] but to “recover” (as a result of Kantian transcendentalizing of it), the temporal framework which has already begun [pp 92.][emphasis added]. The Foucauldian originary or the truly temporal is that point [emphasis added] in time, truth and freedom are bonded [pp. 92]. This is a very Foucauldian theme where Foucault seems to focus on the “points of intersection,” “points of dispersion of power,” etc where truth “reveals itself.”
7) World; subject; truth: Something becomes “truth” only with time [emphasis added] with judgment. The world is an inexhaustible source of knowledge where we cannot go back further. The world is Foucault’s a priori. It is his “fundamental correlation” [pp. 84]. It is the domain of all possible predicates [pp. 85]. The world is given [emphasis added] as a sort of determinism which I interpret as an “open link” that only connects or relates to the subject. The world then is the world, is such a domain in relation to [emphasis added] the subject. The human mind is for Foucault in the system that encompasses the totality of things. But by the very act of our judging i.e. the act of repeating i.e. the repetition of the tripartite divisions, what is fundamental i.e. for Foucault, the world as it is given, becomes “replaced by its transcendental equivalents. The very act of judging = repeating is clarifying, it makes it clear to oneself and others, it declares, it takes the world as given and reinterprets the world not as given but as given by a “transcendental subject.” The act of judging or repetition in time is a will to power of the subject or more specifically put, Kant’s very own will to power. As he repeats this tripartitions, it is a unique act of willing that Kant himself has undertaken to understand the world. Thus Kant transmogrifies the world as given or as it is. Through repetition, Kant is able to make clear that:
“The world is not simply source for a sensible faculty, but the basis of the transcendental correlation of passivity-spontaneity; that the world is not simply a domain for a synthetic understanding, but the basis of the transcendental correlation necessity-liberty; that the world does not simply impose a limit on the use of Ideas, but is the basis of the transcendental correlation reason-mind.” [pp. 86].
8) 2) Popular. The Anthropology gives proofs that look unbiased such that the reader finds himself in a climate of total evidence [pp. 94]. To become [emphasis added] popular, knowledge must be based on the world and human beings – man’s very own tastes and inclinations. The Anthropology is grounded in itself – in its own knowledge and declarations of man and the world. Popularity is made possible by a shared language [pp. 95]. This implies that Kant’s popular Anthropology is speaking from within a shared language structure [emphasis added] and it talks about “man’s taste, inclinations concepts, good etc” from within. Kant thus totalizes language and uses it for his own analysis [pp. 95]. His justifications for how one should conduct oneself, what kind of taste one should develop etc are for Foucault, expressions of their own time. What Kant has does for Foucault is that he has analyzed “the good ways” from within a given language-structure empiricity. The Anthropology is thus, rooted in a German system of expression [pp. 97]. Just based on a thorough analysis of the very bizarre “banquet” in Kant’s Anthropology which indicates what one must do in this and that situation(s) how one should respond and act etc, Foucault wants to claim that language is a form of totality, a total regulation of one’s expressions of which any expressions of freedom and what not must be within this total form. “Everyone is free but in the form of totality [pp. 102].” To realize a concrete universal analysis of man as citizen in the world (Weltburger), he must do it from within his language [pp. 102]. What this entails for us is then that Foucault must want to say that the Kantian a priori is itself grounded in the a priority of the empirical that he can never step foot out.
“The truth that anthropology brings to light is therefore not a truth anterior to language, and that language will [always] be entrusted to convey. It is a truth that is both more interior and more complex: it is the very movement of the exchange, and that exchange realizes the universal truth of man.” [pp. 102]
“The particularities of that language are the legitimate birthplace of the universal significations.” [pp. 103]
9) Truth; movement and language. Through a movement of exchange (appropriating language and by virtue of using it, gives (giving) it a universal particular truth), for Foucault, one would find (or produce) the “universal” – the form of some common human universality applicable to all. Language thus becomes transmogrified into a common form. Then, it repeats. “It repeats in the same place and in the same language, the a priori of knowledge and the moral imperative.” Thus, it (being Kant of course) initiates what he postulates (using language). He initiates “transcendental philosophy” by manipulating symbols and elements from within the given language structure producing his own truth (a synthesis of his own thoughts; jugdgment) of the “a priori subject” of which he declares as a priori. By establishing this a priority as the “originary,” it effaces its very own historicity and empiricity. The correlations and embeddedness in language from which Kant’s judgment is produced itself becomes hidden and obscured. Hence, the very point or moment of repetition, the necessary and transitional act of repetition itself grounds Kant’s judgment. Language accords the Kantian a priori itself with all the privilege and structure.
Kantian thought is thus a thinking that repeats itself and hence, instates itself as truth. Foucault on pp.106 now argues that Anthropology is the site where the confusion of this truth will manifest and this confusion will be reproduced incessantly because Anthropology is characteristic of all the empiricity that Kant will only always fail to escape from it.
Foucault says: The Kantian originary a priori that uses and emerges from language-structure can never “liberate itself from it.” In other words, it can never erase its roots completely and the truth of its historicity [pp. 107]. The only route of escape from this Kantian a priori must be a retracement back into the “density of passive syntheses the already there [pp. 107].” This I believe refers very much to Anthropology and its empirical history. By understanding and seeing this movement [emphasis added] Kant makes from its roots to his transcendental, or the movement of exchange whereby Kant uses language to grant his a priori such and such privilege, one can see a total breakdown of the Kantian a priori as constructed from within a given web of interrelations, and structural points. Once we recognize what should have been this a priority’s justification and meaning, we will also as Foucault thinks, seen truth of the the world (welt) and this truth, in-the-world (In-der-welt) itself.
10) Kant’s Anthropology is a collage of empirical examples. What divides it 1) comes from elsewhere and 2) is directed elsewhere. Where is this elsewhere Foucault is talking about? Firstly, Foucault says that the Anthropology is in solidarity with the whole critical project which gives it its divisions and coherence as we read it. But also, there exist a network of influences [emphasis added] that divides the Anthropology. The Anthropology does not betray its universal impeachment. But Foucault argues that the Anthropology written by Kant is influenced by for instance, Platner’s Anthropology (1772), Baumgarten’s Psychologia Empirica (1749) etc. Foucault claims that one can identify the influence of works and texts on Kant’s Anthropology and or Kant’s understanding of the nature of man.
11) Foucault argues on pp. 116 that “natural being [or man] grounds his [emphasis added] knowledge by limiting it.” This I think can be seen as Foucault wanting to imply that there exist a world of knowledge (the world is knowledge). But man is lesser than the world. For man to ground his own knowledge of the world, he necessarily has to firstly, “engage in the play of nature [substitutable as the world].” This world is what offers him the possibility of him knowing anything. But man in wanting to assert his knowledge, or in other words, to ground his knowledge has to devour only a certain matrix of elements of knowledge. Man necessarily withdraw the [total value] of the world of knowledge [pp. 116]. Thus, Kant’s anthropology, is for Foucault, a reduced form of knowledge. It is a “science reduced, science on a man-made scale, devoid of its own truth but for that very reason, restored to the truth of man [pp. 116].” In this whole sentence, when Foucault says that the Anthropology is “devoid of its own truth,” it means to say that in such a “reduced form” which is now, a form apart from the world of knowledge that gives it truth, this “reduced truth” is now emptied of its own historicity and truth. Such a truth however, is a [or the] truth of man. Anthropology becomes itself, through distancing from its real source of truth, its own truth. It “begins to look like a form of normative language, one that pre-emptively [emphasis added], prescribes [emphasis added] its teaching, its possibilities and its limitations [emphasis added] to every other form of scientific inquiry that engages with man [pp. 116].” As such, Anthropology establishes itself as an illusory originary source of knowledge that can pre-emptively tell people of their good or bad. It can even delineate and set boundaries (physical-physis) and serves as the basis of knowledge of what everything (with regards to man) is. Anthropology begins to serve as the basis of knowledge that limits the boundaries of science etc and finalizes and solidifies the boundaries of what is relevant and what is not [pp. 116]. This implies also that anthropology “takes flight” from the empistemological structures of the world of true knowledge. It now has an epistemological structure of its own which has the power to limit man’s knowledge and horizons [pp. 117]. It has the power to objectify man and offer him predicates that claim to “explicate” his natural being. Anthropology is source of knowledge of any possible knowledge of man [pp. 117].
Conclusion
The only epistemological structure of the world it seems is the world itself in its manifold web of interrelations. Kant’s a priori cannot escape this. The a priority itself betrays its own empiricity and historicity in the Anthropology. In the Anthropology, Kant wants to set forth universal knowledge of the nature of man but this attempt displays a forgotten empiricity – the texts and matters of Kant’s time that gives him such and such a view. If one cannot escape the structure of language and its point of emergence, it also teaches us that we cannot make universal claims of this and that without explicating where we come from. If we do so, our claims of truth only audaciously takes on a universal form. The world of knowledge is a pool of dynamic dionysiac energies, and our representations are only our will to power, to assert our thoughts. Our interpretations of this true world of knowledge can only be one mode of knowing and I think the lesson learnt here is that it is important to recognize this. One’s knowledge of something is always from something – the specifity of that point of intersection of many complexly related movements, issues etc within the world. We cannot claim an absolute in anything and all claims must leave an opening for posterity’s further postulation and argumentation.
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