Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Sunday, March 27, 2005

Narrative Clip from "WAKING LIFE"

The reason why I refuse to take existentialism as just another French fashion or historical curiosity is that I think it has something very important to offer us for the new century. I'm afraid we're losing the real virtues of living life passionately, in the sense of taking responsibility for who you are, and the ability to make something of yourself. And feeling good about life. Existentialism is often discussed as if it's a philosophy of despair, but I think the truth is just the opposite. Sartre, once interviewed, said he never really felt a day of despair in his life. But one thing that comes out from reading these guys is not a sense of anguish about life so much as a real kind of exuberance, a feeling on top of it. It's like your life is yours to create. I've read the postmodernists with some interest, even admiration, but when I read them I always have this awful nagging feeling that something absolutely essential is getting left out. The more that you talk about a person as a social construction, or as a confluence of forces, or as fragmented or marginalized, what you do is you open up a whole new world of excuses. And when Sartre talks about responsibility, he's not talking about something abstract. He's not talking about the kind of self or soul that theologians would argue about. It's something very concrete, like you and me talking, making decisions, doing things and taking the consequences. It might be true that there are six billion people in the world and counting; nevertheless, what you do makes a difference. It makes a difference first of all in material terms, it makes a difference to other people, and it sets an example. In short, I think the message here is that we should never simply write ourselves off and see ourselves as the victim of various forces. It's always our decision who we are.

Saturday, March 26, 2005

GLOBAL STUPIDITY

Believe it or not these questions about Canada were posted publicly on an International Tourism Website (frightening, isn't it)! The responses are added for the sake of humour. Enjoy.

Q: I have never seen it warm on Canadian TV, so how do the plants grow? (UK)
A: We import all plants fully grown and then just sit around and watch them
die.

Q: Will I be able to see Polar Bears in the street? (USA)
A: Depends how much you've been drinking.

Q: I want to walk from Vancouver to Toronto - can I follow the railroad
tracks? (Sweden)
A: Sure, it's only Four thousand miles, take lots of water.

Q: Is it safe to run around in the bushes in Canada? (Sweden)
A: So it's true what they say about Swedes.

Q: It is imperative that I find the names and addresses of places to contact
for a stuffed Beaver. (Italy)
A: Let's not touch this one.

Q: Are there any ATMs (cash machines) in Canada? Can you send me a list of
them in Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and Halifax? (UK)
A: What did your last slave die of?

Q: Can you give me some information about hippo racing in Canada? (USA)
A: A-fri-ca is the big triangle shaped continent south of Europe. Ca-na-da
is that big country to your North... oh forget it. Sure, the hippo racing is
every Tuesday night in Calgary. Come naked.

Q: Which direction is North in Canada? (USA)
A: Face south and then turn 180 degrees Contact us when you get here and
we'll send the rest of the directions.

Q: Can I bring cutlery into Canada? (UK)
A: Why? Just use your fingers like we do.

Q: Can you send me the Vienna Boys' Choir schedule? (USA)
A: Aus-tri-a is that quaint little country bordering Ger-man-y, which is...
oh forget it. Sure, the Vienna Boys Choir plays every Tuesday night in
Vancouver and in Calgary, straight after the hippo races. Come naked.

Q: Do you have perfume in Canada? (Germany)
A: No, WE don't stink.

Q: I have developed a new product that is the fountain of youth. Can you
tell me where I can sell it in Canada? (USA)
A: Anywhere significant numbers of Americans gather.

Q: Can you tell me the regions in British Columbia where the female
population is smaller than the male population? (Italy)
A: Yes, gay nightclubs.

Q: Do you celebrate Thanksgiving in Canada? (USA)
A: Only at Thanksgiving.

Q: Are there supermarkets in Toronto and is milk available all year round?
(Germany)
A: No, we are a peaceful civilization of Vegan hunter/gatherers. Milk is
illegal.

Q: I have a question about a famous animal in Canada, but I forget its name.
It's a kind of big horse with horns.
A: It's called a Moose. They are tall and very violent, eating the brains of
anyone walking close to them. You can scare them off by spraying yourself
with human urine before you go out walking.

Q: I was in Canada in 1969 on R+R, and I want to contact the girl I dated
while I was staying in Surrey, BC. Can you help?
A: Yes, and you will still have to pay her by the hour.

Q: Will I be able to speak English most places I go? (USA)
A: Yes, but you will have to learn it first.

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

BUBBLES ( my hero )

TRUE KNOWLEDGE

Science exists in the form of a set of methods...What is not so well understood...is the effect of this practical success upon the more general theory of reality and knowledge.
Richard Weaver

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

COOL LINX

MEDITATION


Our whole life is supported by the giving and yeilding of some transcendent power.
Joseph Campbell

Monday, March 14, 2005

Reaping the Harvest

In previous blogs I've gone off on the church, stupid people, corperations, etc etc. With this blog I'm not going to stand up for a suicidal maniac but....what's the motive of Terry Razman's murder of seven church goers...including the preacher?

I'll bet a thorough investigation of this guy reveals a deep hatred for the church because a priest molested him. In my community churches were vandalised and burned...but never in the press were the crimes linked to any misappropriate actions of the church. I don't wanna play devils advocate but seriously what drives a guy to murder if not abuse at the hands of a massive pedophile ring operating as priests. I'm surprised this sort of thing hasn't occurred sooner.

For many years when children came foreward with accusations that a priest was a little too hands on what occurred? The child wasn't believed, and if it was reported, the church moved the sick priest to a new community where he could operate with immunity once again. There's a problem here folks. Why is it that the church swept this crap under the carpet for dacades? Now that these unfortunate souls (victimized children) have been shuffled from counsellor to counsellor and decades have passed, boom off goes the time bomb. Why? Because nothing has changed!

I could be wrong maybe he had a tumor on his brain or some biological reason, but still...think about it....crazy guy obsessing about priests misdeeds....sure the murder is wrong and his action may very well be a perfect example of misdirected anger but the action of lashing out at a church representative, in light of the recent controversy with the church and it's sex abuse history, is nothing but logical.

If a society failed to protect its young that society would self destruct. Not only would children be abused but they would have little recourse to justice, as we see today many judges are unwilling to try court cases involving child porn because the cases are so exceedingly disgusting. What occurs then is the resolution via violence. These violent children are everywhere today...dropouts, gang members, dopers, smugglers, bikers. Don't believe me ask a prison inmate about his childhood.

oh oh oh oh ....

It gets better surfing the net I've just come accross another take on wacko Ratzsmann being upset because it was said in his church that we are in the end times! Let the good times roll!
So buddy goes off on account his preacher (yet another wacko) is going on about how bad shit is. Congratulations douchbag your message of hope has been recieved.... How is it that so many people can be so naive when it comes to meeting their spiritual needs? I've not been to a church in decades yet do I feel bad? I actually feel relieved I didn't attend and possibly fall into the plans of some drunken preacher lookin for a tight ass that night. I'm sorry but the church too is an idea which has long since ceased serving a purpose. Money grubbin bums. Point is the church abused children and now is going on about how bad things are but what did they do in WWII but deny the destruction of the Jewish population. What a sick and twisted bit of karma but presto here it is.

There is something absolutly comic about a priest bitchin about the end times and gettin shot later that month by one of his "flock." If Christ did return the church would not only need renovations but some of that lightning flyin out of fingertips justice. To quote from my favorite film "Apocalypse Now" -The bullshit piled up so high... ya needed wings to stay above it-

Saturday, March 12, 2005

SHE'S NOT A GIRL WHO MISSES MUCH

Fuel prices are up. Way up. Why? Because the oil industry has such strong lobbying forces pressuring the government that we've basicly wandered blindly into a corperate handshake with global warming. Oil is inefficient dirty outdated and very powerful....ask Dick Cheney.

Killer Rampaging in Atlanta. Now here's a case for analasis? Why is a rapist being brought to justice without handcuffs? What? The criminal justice system doesn't see him as potentially dangerous? He's a rapist! Wake up.

Killer shoots four RCMP dead. Here's a real coward making a living dismantling stolen cars and growing dope. Who buys large quantities of dope and stolen auto parts? Not other criminals like say - bikers? I feel real safe knowing our police force has it's hands tied when it comes to pursuing investigating and shutting down such destructive types of "citizens."

Big mouth Bush yammerin about Irans nuclear fuel program. What would you do if the biggest bully on the block beat up you closest neighbour? You grab the biggest stone you could possibly throw and hope you never have to use it. Dubya ... your a fuckin idiot.

Friday, March 11, 2005

Welcome To The Machine

Electronic man is no abstraction, but rather the existing individual in a simultaneous culture. Having had his private inidividuality erased anonymously, he is paranoiac and much inclined to violence, for violence is a quest for identity, seeking to discover, "Who am I?" and "What are my limits?"
Marshall McCluhan 1971

All men are constrained by means external to them to ends equally external. The further the technical mechanism develops which allows us to excape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial necessities.
Jacques Ellul 1964

The belief that we have come from somewhere is closely linked with the belief that we are going somewhere. A society which has lost belief in its capacity to progress in the future will quickly cease to concern itself with its progress in the past...our view of history reflects our view of society.
Edward.H. Carr 1961

Today...personal and social freedoms abound; and the general level of understanding of our precarious existential condition is growing, with the aid of mass education and the media. It is to be hoped that this increasing existential awareness will, before we annihilate ourselves in one way or another, overtake the controlling majority who have as yet not fully realized what it means to be human beings.
David.R. Cole 1982

Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been
transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions.
Erich Fromm 1957

Thursday, March 10, 2005

Just another writing exercise

Society of the Axe
27. EXT. MARTINI RIVERSIDE GOLF CLUB

Interviewer: So what might be moved in a single night?

Interviewee: What ever, fifty pounds here and there...more ...depends.

Interviewer: So now your only moving weed?

Interviewee: Pretty much.

Interviewer: So how often do you move it.

Interviewee: Depends on who comes lookin but pretty much when I can.

Interviewer: Did you ever smuggle people?

Interviewee: uh.....yup... only a couple times.

Interviewer: How do you move people accross the border?

Interviewee: It changes from year to year. A couple of years ago there seemed to be more Asians going to New York than you could count...today its quiet, ....for that.

Interviewer: So year to year, month to month, the smuggling business changes.

Interviewee: Yup.

Interviewer: What were you doing five years ago?

Interviewee: Same as now....(laughing) different delivery... different...dope (lights cigar leaf blunt )

Interviewer: So how did you say you moved weed?

Interviewee:(moving joint to lips) like this.... (laughing) ya... moving just green ...mostly just through the summer... you know...like today...outside ...in the sun....on boats...(pauses)...look! (points to horizon) where else can you sit out at a bar on the river and wait. Fuck its the bomb...serious....but I've had a lot of fucking jobs lately.

Interviewer: Is it difficult to sell so much weed?

Interviewee: Fuck no ...we dont even have to ... people come to me! (coughing) Connections it's all about who you know. You call it smuggling...you created the borders...as long as somebody wants it here and somebody else has it over there... the way I look at it ...it's business...free trade...well not exactly free but...

Interviewer: Approximatly, how much would you say you could make in a month?

Interviewee: As much as you want!

Interviewer: Could you give me an example?

Interviewee: Well...uh...say I dont know. Lets say I meet some guy state-side whose looking for whatever. The loopholes are everywhere.

Interviewer: What would you move for this customer?

Interviewee: What ever, I've moved rugs...like nice fuckin rugs...ya know, India style. Last week dude! Fuck you should...well next time your by my place I'll show ya... dude you'll see...my place looks like the fuckin garaj mahal now...

Interviewer: You mean Taj Mahal

Interviewee: Whatever....( pause ) what was I sayin?

Interviewer: You were talking about things you smuggled.

Interviewee: Uh, ya ...like smokes, booze, drugs, perscription drugs, fuckin cars...you name it.
Fuck I remeber back in high school we'd take the bus over the bridge and sell the shit when we got to school.

Interviewer: So as far back as high school you've been busy?

Interviewee: Pretty much.

Interviewer: Does it bother you that different drugs are an epidemic in schools today?

Interviewee: I don't know where it goes, when it goes, I just keep moving it... transport for... like between two - three g's a trip. Cost depends on whats moved.

Interviewer: So theres a lot of cash changing hands?

Interviewee: Thats why we need the boats, the guns. Don't kid yourself if I wasn't packin I'd get robbed a dozen times a week...and I'd never be where I am today...supply and demand with a gatt ...thats all it is. Pure and simple.

Interviewer: Are you ever concerned you'll be shot and injured or killed.

Interviewee: We're middle men...both sides need us...nobody comes lookin to shoot us....if you burn someone then there's reason. You might get shot that way.

Interviewer: Do you deal with anyone else ...like ( name withheld )?

Interviewee: That goat fucker! What a cracker ass fuck , he's fucked. You know him? I don't want anything to do with this if he's in this....shit. Fuckin crack head that guy eh...you know that? I'm fuckin serious...him I'll shoot.

Interviewer: Do smugglers often work alone?

Interviewee: No...uh...I shouldn't say too much...but , no ...it's a process....you know making sure routes are clear, no one is around, makin sure border guards are paid off. It's not real complicated either, so...

Interviewer: So with (name withheld) why don't you two ...

Interviewee: (interupting) because he's weak. When I do somethin I wanna do it right. I don't set out in the mornin to loose money. That fuckin clown, it's like he doesn't care. He's got his white girlfriends, his fat ride, he's done soon. He's movin white with the bikers...I personally hope he fucks up and gets wacked.

Interviewer: Why'd ya say that?

Interviewee: Put it this way. I deal with green because I make money at it and it doesn't leave me a fuckin zombie at the end of the day, guys who move different shit have different issues. People? Where the fuck ya puttin them? Twelve people take up alot more room than 50 pounds. Plus you'd make alot less money.

Interviewer: Tell me more about New York?

Interviewee: Fuggetaboutit.

Interviewer: Boston?

Interviewee: Nope!

Interviewer: How about your vacation in Mexico?

Interviewee: Good times.

Interviewer: Cuba?

Interviewee: Great fucking cigars.

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

More Foucault ( & my favorite things)

Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault - October 25th, 1982.
From: Martin, L.H. et al (1988) Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock. pp.9-15.
Why did you come to the University of Vermont?
I came to try to explain more precisely to some people what kind of work I am doing, to know what kind of work they are doing, and to establish some permanent relationships. I am not a writer, a philosopher, a great figure of intellectual life: I am a teacher. There is a social phenomenon that troubles me a great deal: Since the 1960s, some teachers are becoming public men with the same obligations. I don't want to become a prohet and say, "Please sit down, what I have to say is very important." I have come to discuss our common work.
You are most frequently termed "philosopher" but also "historian", "structuralist", and "Marxist". The title of your chair at the College de France is "Professor of the History of Systems of Thought". What does this mean?
I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being. The way he thinks is related to society, politics, economics, and history and is also related to very general and universal categories and formal structures. But thought is something other than societal relations. The way people really think is not adequately analyzed by the universal categories of logic. Between social history and formal analyses of thought there is a path, a lane - maybe very narrow - which is the path of the historian of thought.
In The History of Sexuality, you refer to the person who "upsets established laws and somehow anticipates the coming freedom." Do you see your own work in this light?
No. For rather a long period, people have asked me to tell them what will happen and to give them a program for the future. We know very well that, even with the best intentions, those programs become a tool, an instrument of oppression. Rousseau, a lover of freedom, was used in the French Revolution to build up a model of social oppression. Marx would be horrified by Stalinism and Leninism. My role - and that is too emphatic a word - is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. To change something in the minds of people - that's the role of an intellectual.
In your writing you seem fascinated by figures who exist on the margins of society: madmen, lepers, criminals, deviants, hermaphrodites, murderers, obscure thinkers. Why?
I am sometimes reproached for selecting marginal thinkers instead of taking examples from the mainstream of history. My answer will be snobbish: It's impossible to see figures like Bopp and Ricardo as obscure.
But what about your interest in social outcasts?
I deal with obscure figures and processes for two reasons: The political and social processes by which the Western European societies were put in order are not very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are part of our most familiar landscape, and we don't perceive them anymore. But most of them once scandalized people. It is one of my targets to show people that a lot of things that are part of their landscape - that people are universal - are the result of some very precise historical changes. All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made.
Your writings carry profound emotional undercurrents unusual in scholarly analyses: anguish in Discipline and Punish, scorn and hope in The Order of Things, outrage and sadness in Madness and Civilization.
Each of my works is a part of my own biography. For one or another reason I had the occasion to feel and live those things. To take a simple example, I used to work in a psychiatric hospital in the 1950s. After having studied philosophy, I wanted to see what madness was: I had been mad enough to study reason; I was reasonable enough to study madness. I was free to move from the patients to the attendants, for I had no precise role. It was the time of the blooming of neurosurgery, the beginning of psychopharmology, the reign of the traditional institution. At first I accepted things as necessary, but then after three months (I am slow-minded!), I asked, "What is the necessity of these things?" After three years I left the job and went to Sweden in great personal discomfort and started to write a history of these practices [Madness and Civilization]. Madness and Civilization was intended to be a first volume. I like to write first volumes, and I hate to write second ones. It was perceived as a psychiatricide, but it was a description from history. You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from the lazar house, he becomes infuriated.
What about the genesis of Discipline and Punish?
I must confess I have had no direct links with prisons or prisoners, though I did work as a psychologist in a French prison. When I was in Tunisia, I saw people jailed for political expediency, and that influenced me.
The classical age is pivotal in all your writings. Do you feel nostalgia for the clarity of that age or for the "visibility" of the Renassance when everything was unified and displayed?
All of this beauty of old times is an effect of and not a reason for nostalgia. I know very well that it is our own invention. But it's quite good to have this kind of nostalgia, just as it's good to have a good relationship with your own childhood if you have children. It's a good thing to have nostalgia toward some periods on the condition that it's a way to have a thoughtful and positive relation to your own present. But if nostalgia is a reason to be aggressive and uncomprehending toward the present, it has to be excluded.
What do you read for pleasure?
The books which produce in me the most emotion: Faulkner, Thomas Mann, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano.
What were the intellectual influences upon your thought?
I was surprised when two of my friends in Berkeley wrote something about me and said that Heidegger was influential [Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1982)]. Of course it was quite true, but no one in France has ever perceived it. When I was a student in the 1950s, I read Husserl, Satre, Merleau-Ponty. When you feel an overwhelming influence, you try to open a window. Paradoxically enough, Heidegger is not very difficult for a Frenchman to understand. When every word is an enigma, you are in a not-too-bad position to understand Heidegger. Being and Time is difficult, but the more recent works are clearer. Nietzsche was a revelation to me. I felt that there was someone quite different from what I had been taught. I read him with a great passion and broke with my life, left my job in the asylum, left France: I had the feeling I had been trapped. Through Nietzsche, I had become a stranger to all that. I'm still not quite integrated withing French social and intellectual life. If I were younger, I would have immigrated to the United States.
Why?
I see possibilities. You don't have a homogenous intellectual and cultural life. As a foreigner, I don't have to be integrated. There is no pressure upon me. There are a lot of great universities, all with very different interests. But of course I might have been fired out of them in the most outrageous way.
Why do you think you might have been fired?
I'm very proud that some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist.
From reading The Order of Things, one might conclude that individual efforts to reform are impossible because new discoveries have all sorts of meanings and implications their creators never could have understood. In Discipline and Punish, for instance, you show that there was a sudden change from the chain gang to the closed police carriage, from the spectacle of punishment to disciplined institutional punishment. But you also point out that this change, which seemed at the time a "reform", was actually only the normalizing of society's ability to punish. So how is conscious change possible?
How can you imagine that I think change is impossible since what I have analyzed was always related to political action? All of Discipline and Punish is an attempt to answer this question and to show how a new way of thinking took place. All of us are living and thinking subjects. What I react against is the fact that there is a breach between social history and the history of ideas. Social historians are supposed to describe how people act without thinking, and historians of ideas are supposed to descibe how people think without acting. Everybody both acts and thinks. The way people acts or react is linked to a way of thinking, and of course thinking is related to tradition. What I have tried to analyze is this very complex phenomenon that made people react in another way to crimes and criminals in a rather short period of time. I have written two kinds of books. One, The Order of Things, is concerned only with scientific thought: the other, Discipline and Punish, is concerned with social principles and institutions. History of science doesn't develop in the same way as social sensibility. In order to be recognized as scientific discourse, thought must obey certain criteria. In Discipline and Punish, texts, practices, and people struggle against each other. In my books I have really tried to analyze changes, not in order to find the material causes but to show all the factors that interacted and the reactions of people. I believe in the freedom of people. To the same situation, people react in very different ways.
You conclude Discipline and Punish by saying that it will "serve as a background for various studies of normalization and the power of knowledge in modern society." What is the relationship of normalization and the concept of man as the center of knowledge?
Through these different practices - psychological, medical, penitential, educational - a certain idea or model of humanity was developed, and now this idea of man has become normative, self-evident, and is supposed to be universal. Humanism may not be universal but may be quite relative to a certain situation. What we call humanism has been used by Marxists, liberals, Nazis, Catholics. This does not mean that we have to get rid of what we call human rights or freedom, but that we can't say that freedom or human rights has to be limited at certain frontiers. For instance, if you asked eighty years ago if feminine virtue was part of universal humanism, everyone would have answered yes. What I am afraid of about humanism is that it presents a certain form of our ethics as a universal model for any kind of freedom. I think that there are more secrets, more possible freedoms, and more inventions in our future than we can imagine in humanism as it is dogmatically represented on every side of the political rainbow: the Left, the Center, the Right.
And this is what is suggested by "Technologies of the Self"?
A. Yes. You said before that you have the feeling that I am unpredictable. That's true. But I sometimes appear to myself much too systematic and rigid. What I have studied are the three traditional problems: (1) What are the relations we have to truth through scientific knowledge, to those "truth games" which are so important in civilization and in which we are both subject and objects? (2) What are the relationships we have to others through those strange strategies and power relationships? And (3) what are the relationships between truth, power, and self? I would like to finish with a question: What could be more classic than these questions and more systematic than the evolution through questions one, two, and three and back to the first? I am just at this point.
back
© thefoucauldian.co.ukmm03

http://www.jimhopper.com/havel.html Vaclav Havel @ Harvard

http://www.geocities.com/sartresite/articles.html Sartre Essays

http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/42.htm Existential Info

Friday, March 04, 2005

television has gotten pretty stupid

WELCOME TO THE MACHINE

"In organizing 'cells', 'places' and 'ranks', the diciplines create complex spaces that are at once architectural, functional and hierarchical. It is spaces that provide fixed positions and permit circulation; they carve out individual segments and establish operatonal links; they mark places and and indicate values; they guarantee the obedience of individuals, but also a better economy of time and gesture."
T. Hagerstrand 'Space, Time and Human Conditions'

"Previously, the art of building corresponded to the need to make power, divinity and might manifest. The palace and the church were the great architectural forms, along with the stronghold. Architecture manifest might, the Sovereign, God....it becomes a question of using the disposition of space for economico-political ends."
M.Foucault 'Power/Knowledge'

FOUCAULT

Michel Foucault
What Is Enlightenment?
Today when a periodical asks its readers a question, it does so in order to collect opinions on some subject about which everyone has an opinion already; there is not much likelihood of learning anything new. In the eighteenth century, editors preferred to question the public on problems that did not yet have solutions. I don't know whether or not that practice was more effective; it was unquestionably more entertaining.
In any event, in line with this custom, in November 1784 a German periodical, Berlinische Monatschrift published a response to the question: Was ist Aufklärung? And the respondent was Kant.
A minor text, perhaps. But it seems to me that it marks the discreet entrance into the history of thought of a question that modern philosophy has not been capable of answering, but that it has never managed to get rid of, either. And one that has been repeated in various forms for two centuries now. From Hegel through Nietzsche or Max Weber to Horkheimer or Habermas, hardly any philosophy has failed to confront this same question, directly or indirectly. What, then, is this event that is called the Aufklärung and that has determined, at least in part, what we are, what we think, and what we do today? Let us imagine that the Berlinische Monatschrift still exists and that it is asking its readers the question: What is modern philosophy? Perhaps we could respond with an echo: modern philosophy is the philosophy that is attempting to answer the question raised so imprudently two centuries ago: Was ist Aufklärung?
Let us linger a few moments over Kant's text. It merits attention for several reasons.
1. To this same question, Moses Mendelssohn had also replied in the same journal, just two months earlier. But Kant had not seen Mendelssohn's text when he wrote his. To be sure, the encounter of the German philosophical movement with the new development of Jewish culture does not date from this precise moment. Mendelssohn had been at that crossroads for thirty years or so, in company with Lessing. But up to this point it had been a matter of making a place for Jewish culture within German thought -- which Lessing had tried to do in Die Juden -- or else of identifying problems common to Jewish thought and to German philosophy; this is what Mendelssohn had done in his Phadon; oder, Über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele. With the two texts published in the Berlinische Monatschrift the German Aufklärung and the Jewish Haskala recognize that they belong to the same history; they are seeking to identify the common processes from which they stem. And it is perhaps a way of announcing the acceptance of a common destiny -- we now know to what drama that was to lead.
2. But there is more. In itself and within the Christian tradition, Kant's text poses a new problem.
It was certainly not the first time that philosophical thought had sought to reflect on its own present. But, speaking schematically, we may say that this reflection had until then taken three main forms.
- The present may be represented as belonging to a certain era of the world, distinct from the others through some inherent characteristics, or separated from the others by some dramatic event. Thus, in Plato's Statesman the interlocutors recognize that they belong to one of those revolutions of the world in which the world is turning backwards, with all the negative consequences that may ensue.
- The present may be interrogated in an attempt to decipher in it the heralding signs of a forthcoming event. Here we have the principle of a kind of historical hermeneutics of which Augustine might provide an example.
- The present may also be analyzed as a point of transition toward the dawning of a new world. That is what Vico describes in the last chapter of La Scienza Nuova; what he sees 'today' is 'a complete humanity ... spread abroad through all nations, for a few great monarchs rule over this world of peoples'; it is also 'Europe ... radiant with such humanity that it abounds in all the good things that make for the happiness of human life.' [1]
Now the way Kant poses the question of Aufklärung is entirely different: it is neither a world era to which one belongs, nor an event whose signs are perceived, nor the dawning of an accomplishment. Kant defines Aufklärung in an almost entirely negative way, as an Ausgang, an 'exit,' a 'way out.' In his other texts on history, Kant occasionally raises questions of origin or defines the internal teleology of a historical process. In the text on Aufklärung, he deals with the question of contemporary reality alone. He is not seeking to understand the present on the basis of a totality or of a future achievement. He is looking for a difference: What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?
3. I shall not go into detail here concerning this text, which is not always very clear despite its brevity. I should simply like to point out three or four features that seem to me important if we are to understand how Kant raised the philosophical question of the present day.
Kant indicates right away that the 'way out' that characterizes Enlightenment is a process that releases us from the status of 'immaturity.' And by 'immaturity,' he means a certain state of our will that makes us accept someone else's authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for. Kant gives three examples: we are in a state of 'immaturity' when a book takes the place of our understanding, when a spiritual director takes the place of our conscience, when a doctor decides for us what our diet is to be. (Let us note in passing that the register of these three critiques is easy to recognize, even though the text does not make it explicit.) In any case, Enlightenment is defined by a modification of the preexisting relation linking will, authority, and the use of reason.
We must also note that this way out is presented by Kant in a rather ambiguous manner. He characterizes it as a phenomenon, an ongoing process; but he also presents it as a task and an obligation. From the very first paragraph, he notes that man himself is responsible for his immature status. Thus it has to be supposed that he will be able to escape from it only by a change that he himself will bring about in himself. Significantly, Kant says that this Enlightenment has a Wahlspruch: now a Wahlspruch is a heraldic device, that is, a distinctive feature by which one can be recognized, and it is also a motto, an instruction that one gives oneself and proposes to others. What, then, is this instruction? Aude sapere: 'dare to know,' 'have the courage, the audacity, to know.' Thus Enlightenment must be considered both as a process in which men participate collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished personally. Men are at once elements and agents of a single process. They may be actors in the process to the extent that they participate in it; and the process occurs to the extent that men decide to be its voluntary actors.
A third difficulty appears here in Kant's text in his use of the word 'mankind,' Menschheit. The importance of this word in the Kantian conception of history is well known. Are we to understand that the entire human race is caught up in the process of Enlightenment? In that case, we must imagine Enlightenment as a historical change that affects the political and social existence of all people on the face of the earth. Or are we to understand that it involves a change affecting what constitutes the humanity of human beings? But the question then arises of knowing what this change is. Here again, Kant's answer is not without a certain ambiguity. In any case, beneath its appearance of simplicity, it is rather complex.
Kant defines two essential conditions under which mankind can escape from its immaturity. And these two conditions are at once spiritual and institutional, ethical and political.
The first of these conditions is that the realm of obedience and the realm of the use of reason be clearly distinguished. Briefly characterizing the immature status, Kant invokes the familiar expression: 'Don't think, just follow orders'; such is, according to him, the form in which military discipline, political power, and religious authority are usually exercised. Humanity will reach maturity when it is no longer required to obey, but when men are told: 'Obey, and you will be able to reason as much as you like.' We must note that the German word used here is räsonieren; this word, which is also used in the Critiques does not refer to just any use of reason, but to a use of reason in which reason has no other end but itself: räsonieren is to reason for reasoning's sake. And Kant gives examples, these too being perfectly trivial in appearance: paying one's taxes, while being able to argue as much as one likes about the system of taxation, would be characteristic of the mature state; or again, taking responsibility for parish service, if one is a pastor, while reasoning freely about religious dogmas.
We might think that there is nothing very different here from what has been meant, since the sixteenth century, by freedom of conscience: the right to think as one pleases so long as one obeys as one must. Yet it is here that Kant brings into play another distinction, and in a rather surprising way. The distinction he introduces is between the private and public uses of reason. But he adds at once that reason must be free in its public use, and must be submissive in its private use. Which is, term for term, the opposite of what is ordinarily called freedom of conscience.
But we must be somewhat more precise. What constitutes, for Kant, this private use of reason? In what area is it exercised? Man, Kant says, makes a private use of reason when he is 'a cog in a machine'; that is, when he has a role to play in society and jobs to do: to be a soldier, to have taxes to pay, to be in charge of a parish, to be a civil servant, all this makes the human being a particular segment of society; he finds himself thereby placed in a circumscribed position, where he has to apply particular rules and pursue particular ends. Kant does not ask that people practice a blind and foolish obedience, but that they adapt the use they make of their reason to these determined circumstances; and reason must then be subjected to the particular ends in view. Thus there cannot be, here, any free use of reason.
On the other hand, when one is reasoning only in order to use one's reason, when one is reasoning as a reasonable being (and not as a cog in a machine), when one is reasoning as a member of reasonable humanity, then the use of reason must be free and public. Enlightenment is thus not merely the process by which individuals would see their own personal freedom of thought guaranteed. There is Enlightenment when the universal, the free, and the public uses of reason are superimposed on one another.
Now this leads us to a fourth question that must be put to Kant's text. We can readily see how the universal use of reason (apart from any private end) is the business of the subject himself as an individual; we can readily see, too, how the freedom of this use may be assured in a purely negative manner through the absence of any challenge to it; but how is a public use of that reason to be assured? Enlightenment, as we see, must not be conceived simply as a general process affecting all humanity; it must not be conceived only as an obligation prescribed to individuals: it now appears as a political problem. The question, in any event, is that of knowing how the use of reason can take the public form that it requires, how the audacity to know can be exercised in broad daylight, while individuals are obeying as scrupulously as possible. And Kant, in conclusion, proposes to Frederick II, in scarcely veiled terms, a sort of contract -- what might be called the contract of rational despotism with free reason: the public and free use of autonomous reason will be the best guarantee of obedience, on condition, however, that the political principle that must be obeyed itself be in conformity with universal reason.
Let us leave Kant's text here. I do not by any means propose to consider it as capable of constituting an adequate description of Enlightenment; and no historian, I think, could be satisfied with it for an analysis of the social, political, and cultural transformations that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century.
Nevertheless, notwithstanding its circumstantial nature, and without intending to give it an exaggerated place in Kant's work, I believe that it is necessary to stress the connection that exists between this brief article and the three Critiques. Kant in fact describes Enlightenment as the moment when humanity is going to put its own reason to use, without subjecting itself to any authority; now it is precisely at this moment that the critique is necessary, since its role is that of defining the conditions under which the use of reason is legitimate in order to determine what can be known, what must be done, and what may be hoped. Illegitimate uses of reason are what give rise to dogmatism and heteronomy, along with illusion; on the other hand, it is when the legitimate use of reason has been clearly defined in its principles that its autonomy can be assured. The critique is, in a sense, the handbook of reason that has grown up in Enlightenment; and, conversely, the Enlightenment is the age of the critique.
It is also necessary, I think, to underline the relation between this text of Kant's and the other texts he devoted to history. These latter, for the most part, seek to define the internal teleology of time and the point toward which history of humanity is moving. Now the analysis of Enlightenment, defining this history as humanity's passage to its adult status, situates contemporary reality with respect to the overall movement and its basic directions. But at the same time, it shows how, at this very moment, each individual is responsible in a certain way for that overall process.
The hypothesis I should like to propose is that this little text is located in a sense at the crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history. It is a reflection by Kant on the contemporary status of his own enterprise. No doubt it is not the first time that a philosopher has given his reasons for undertaking his work at a particular moment. But it seems to me that it is the first time that a philosopher has connected in this way, closely and from the inside, the significance of his work with respect to knowledge, a reflection on history and a particular analysis of the specific moment at which he is writing and because of which he is writing. 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.
I know that modernity is often spoken of as an epoch, or at least as a set of features characteristic of an epoch; situated on a calendar, it would be preceded by a more or less naive or archaic premodernity, and followed by an enigmatic and troubling 'postmodernity.' And then we find ourselves asking whether modernity constitutes the sequel to the Enlightenment and its development, or whether we are to see it as a rupture or a deviation with respect to the basic principles of the 18th century.
Thinking back on Kant's text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a period of history. And by 'attitude,' I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos. And consequently, rather than seeking to distinguish the 'modern era' from the 'premodern' or 'postmodern,' I think it would be more useful to try to find out how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found itself struggling with attitudes of 'countermodernity.'
To characterize briefly this attitude of modernity, I shall take an almost indispensable example, namely, Baudelaire; for his consciousness of modernity is widely recognized as one of the most acute in the nineteenth century.
1. Modernity is often characterized in terms of consciousness of the discontinuity of time: a break with tradition, a feeling of novelty, of vertigo in the face of the passing moment. And this is indeed what Baudelaire seems to be saying when he defines modernity as 'the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent.' [2] But, for him, being modern does not lie in recognizing and accepting this perpetual movement; on the contrary, it lies in adopting a certain attitude with respect to this movement; and this deliberate, difficult attitude consists in recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it. Modernity is distinct from fashion, which does no more than call into question the course of time; modernity is the attitude that makes it possible to grasp the 'heroic' aspect of the present moment. Modernity is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the will to 'heroize' the present .
I shall restrict myself to what Baudelaire says about the painting of his contemporaries. Baudelaire makes fun of those painters who, finding nineteenth-century dress excessively ugly, want to depict nothing but ancient togas. But modernity in painting does not consist, for Baudelaire, in introducing black clothing onto the canvas. The modern painter is the one who can show the dark frock-coat as 'the necessary costume of our time,' the one who knows how to make manifest, in the fashion of the day, the essential, permanent, obsessive relation that our age entertains with death. 'The dress-coat and frock-coat not only possess their political beauty, which is an expression of universal equality, but also their poetic beauty, which is an expression of the public soul -- an immense cortège of undertaker's mutes (mutes in love, political mutes, bourgeois mutes...). We are each of us celebrating some funeral.' [3] To designate this attitude of modernity, Baudelaire sometimes employs a litotes that is highly significant because it is presented in the form of a precept: 'You have no right to despise the present.'
2. This heroization is ironical, needless to say. The attitude of modernity does not treat the passing moment as sacred in order to try to maintain or perpetuate it. It certainly does not involve harvesting it as a fleeting and interesting curiosity. That would be what Baudelaire would call the spectator's posture. The flâneur, the idle, strolling spectator, is satisfied to keep his eyes open, to pay attention and to build up a storehouse of memories. In opposition to the flâneur, Baudelaire describes the man of modernity: 'Away he goes, hurrying, searching .... Be very sure that this man ... -- this solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert -- has an aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur, an aim more general, something other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call 'modernity.' ... He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history.' As an example of modernity, Baudelaire cites the artist Constantin Guys. In appearance a spectator, a collector of curiosities, he remains 'the last to linger wherever there can be a glow of light, an echo of poetry, a quiver of life or a chord of music; wherever a passion can pose before him, wherever natural man and conventional man display themselves in a strange beauty, wherever the sun lights up the swift joys of the depraved animal.' [4]
But let us make no mistake. Constantin Guys is not a flâneur; what makes him the modern painter par excellence in Baudelaire's eyes is that, just when the whole world is falling asleep, he begins to work, and he transfigures that world. His transfiguration does not entail an annulling of reality, but a difficult interplay between the truth of what is real and the exercise of freedom; 'natural' things become 'more than natural,' 'beautiful' things become 'more than beautiful,' and individual objects appear 'endowed with an impulsive life like the soul of their creator.' [5] For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is. Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it.
3. However, modernity for Baudelaire is not simply a form of relationship to the present; it is also a mode of relationship that has to be established with oneself. The deliberate attitude of modernity is tied to an indispensable asceticism. To be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration: what Baudelaire, in the vocabulary of his day, calls dandysme. Here I shall not recall in detail the well-known passages on 'vulgar, earthy, vile nature'; on man's indispensable revolt against himself; on the 'doctrine of elegance' which imposes 'upon its ambitious and humble disciples' a discipline more despotic than the most terrible religions; the pages, finally, on the asceticism of the dandy who makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art. 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.
4. Let me add just one final word. This ironic heroization of the present, this transfiguring play of freedom with reality, this ascetic elaboration of the self -- Baudelaire does not imagine that these have any place in society itself, or in the body politic. They can only be produced in another, a different place, which Baudelaire calls art.
I do not pretend to be summarizing in these few lines either the complex historical event that was the Enlightenment, at the end of the eighteenth century, or the attitude of modernity in the various guises it may have taken on during the last two centuries.
I have been seeking, on the one hand, to emphasize the extent to which a type of philosophical interrogation -- one that simultaneously problematizes man's relation to the present, man's historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject -- is rooted in the Enlightenment. On the other hand, I have been seeking to stress that the thread that may connect us with the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude -- that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era. I should like to characterize this ethos very briefly.
A. Negatively
1. This ethos implies, first, the refusal of what I like to call the 'blackmail' of the Enlightenment. I think that the Enlightenment, as a set of political, economic, social, institutional, and cultural events on which we still depend in large part, constitutes a privileged domain for analysis. I also think that as an enterprise for linking the progress of truth and the history of liberty in a bond of direct relation, it formulated a philosophical question that remains for us to consider. I think, finally, as I have tried to show with reference to Kant's text, that it defined a certain manner of philosophizing.
But that does not mean that one has to be 'for' or 'against' the Enlightenment. It even means precisely that one has to refuse everything that might present itself in the form of a simplistic and authoritarian alternative: you either accept the Enlightenment and remain within the tradition of its rationalism (this is considered a positive term by some and used by others, on the contrary, as a reproach); or else you criticize the Enlightenment and then try to escape from its principles of rationality (which may be seen once again as good or bad). And w e do not break free of this blackmail by introducing 'dialectical' nuances while seeking to determine what good and bad elements there may have been in the Enlightenment.
We must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are historically determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment. Such an analysis implies a series of historical inquiries that are as precise as possible; and these inquiries will not be oriented retrospectively toward the 'essential kernel of rationality' that can be found in the Enlightenment and that would have to be preserved in any event; they will be oriented toward the 'contemporary limits of the necessary,' that is, toward what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects.
2. This permanent critique of ourselves has to avoid the always too facile confusions between humanism and Enlightenment.
We must never forget that the Enlightenment is an event, or a set of events and complex historical processes, that is located at a certain point in the development of European societies. As such, it includes elements of social transformation, types of political institution, forms of knowledge, projects of rationalization of knowledge and practices, technological mutations that are very difficult to sum up in a word, even if many of these phenomena remain important today. The one I have pointed out and that seems to me to have been at the basis of an entire form of philosophical reflection concerns only the mode of reflective relation to the present.
Humanism is something entirely different. It is a theme or rather a set of themes that have reappeared on several occasions over time in European societies; these themes always tied to value judgments have obviously varied greatly in their content as well as in the values they have preserved. Furthermore they have served as a critical principle of differentiation. In the seventeenth century there was a humanism that presented itself as a critique of Christianity or of religion in general; there was a Christian humanism opposed to an ascetic and much more theocentric humanism. In the nineteenth century there was a suspicious humanism hostile and critical toward science and another that to the contrary placed its hope in that same science. Marxism has been a humanism; so have existentialism and personalism; there was a time when people supported the humanistic values represented by National Socialism and when the Stalinists themselves said they were humanists.
From this we must not conclude that everything that has ever been linked with humanism is to be rejected but that the humanistic thematic is in itself too supple too diverse too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection. And it is a fact that at least since the seventeenth century what is called humanism has always been obliged to lean on certain conceptions of man borrowed from religion science or politics. Humanism serves to color and to justify the conceptions of man to which it is after all obliged to take recourse.
Now in this connection I believe that this thematic which so often recurs and which always depends on humanism can be opposed by the principle of a critique and a permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy: that is a principle that is at the heart of the historical consciousness that the Enlightenment has of itself. From this standpoint I am inclined to see Enlightenment and humanism in a state of tension rather than identity.
In any case it seems to me dangerous to confuse them; and further it seems historically inaccurate. If the question of man of the human species of the humanist was important throughout the eighteenth century this is very rarely I believe because the Enlightenment considered itself a humanism. It is worthwhile too to note that throughout the nineteenth century the historiography of sixteenth-century humanism which was so important for people like Saint-Beuve or Burckhardt was always distinct from and sometimes explicitly opposed to the Enlightenment and the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century had a tendency to oppose the two at least as much as to confuse them.
In any case I think that just as we must free ourselves from the intellectual blackmail of being for or against the Enlightenment we must escape from the historical and moral confusionism that mixes the theme of humanism with the question of the Enlightenment. An analysis of their complex relations in the course of the last two centuries would be a worthwhile project an important one if we are to bring some measure of clarity to the consciousness that we have of ourselves and of our past.
B. Positively
Yet while taking these precautions into account we must obviously give a more positive content to what may be a philosophical ethos consisting in a critique of what we are saying thinking and doing through a historical ontology of ourselves.
1. This philosophical ethos may be characterized as a limit-attitude. We are not talking about a gesture of rejection. We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits. But if the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge has to renounce transgressing, it seems to me that the critical question today has to be turned back into a positive one: in what is given lo us as universal necessary obligatory what place is occupied by whatever is singular contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints? The point in brief is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that lakes the form of a possible transgression.
This entails an obvious consequence: that 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. In that sense, this criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method. Archaeological -- and not transcendental -- in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events. And this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it 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. It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.
2. But if we are not to settle for the affirmation or the empty dream of freedom, it seems to me that this 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 change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take. This means that the historical ontology of ourselves must turn away from all projects that claim to be global or radical. In fact we know from experience that the claim to escape from the system of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another society, of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has led only to the return of the most dangerous traditions.
I prefer the very specific transformations that have proved to be possible in the last twenty years in a certain number of areas that concern our ways of being and thinking, relations to authority, relations between the sexes, the way in which we perceive insanity or illness; I prefer even these partial transformations that have been made in the correlation of historical analysis and the practical attitude, to the programs for a new man that the worst political systems have repeated throughout the twentieth century.
I shall thus characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings.
3. Still, the following objection would no doubt be entirely legitimate: if we limit ourselves to this type of always partial and local inquiry or test, do we not run the risk of letting ourselves be determined by more general structures of which we may well not be conscious, and over which we may have no control?
To this, two responses. It is true that we have to give up hope of ever acceding to a point of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits. And from this point of view the theoretical and practical experience that we have of our limits and of the possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we are always in the position of beginning again .
But that does not mean that no work can be done except in disorder and contingency. The work in question has its generality, its systematicity, its homogeneity, and its stakes.
(a) Its Stakes
These are indicated by what might be called 'the paradox of the relations of capacity and power.' We know that the great promise or the great hope of the eighteenth century, or a part of the eighteenth century, lay in the simultaneous and proportional growth of individuals with respect to one another. And, moreover, we can see that throughout the entire history of Western societies (it is perhaps here that the root of their singular historical destiny is located --such a peculiar destiny, so different from the others in its trajectory and so universalizing, so dominant with respect to the others), the acquisition of capabilities and the struggle for freedom have constituted permanent elements. Now the relations between the growth of capabilities and the growth of autonomy are not as simple as the eighteenth century may have believed. And we have been able to see what forms of power relation were conveyed by various technologies (whether we are speaking of productions with economic aims, or institutions whose goal is social regulation, or of techniques of communication): disciplines, both collective and individual, procedures of normalization exercised in the name of the power of the state, demands of society or of population zones, are examples. What is at stake, then, is this: How can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?
(b) Homogeneity
This leads to the study of what could be called 'practical systems.' Here we are taking as a homogeneous domain of reference not the representations that men give of themselves, not the conditions that determine them without their knowledge, but rather what they do and the way they do it. That is, the forms of rationality that organize their ways of doing things (this might be called the technological aspect) and the freedom with which they act within these practical systems, reacting to what others do, modifying the rules of the game, up to a certain point (this might be called the strategic side of these practices). The homogeneity of these historico-critical analyses is thus ensured by this realm of practices, with their technological side and their strategic side.
(c) Systematicity
These practical systems stem from three broad areas: relations of control over things, relations of action upon others, relations with oneself. This does not mean that each of these three areas is completely foreign to the others. It is well known that control over things is mediated by relations with others; and relations with others in turn always entail relations with oneself, and vice versa. But we have three axes whose specificity and whose interconnections have to be analyzed: the axis of knowledge, the axis of power, the axis of ethics. In other terms, the historical ontology of ourselves has to answer an open series of questions; it has to make an indefinite number of inquiries which may be multiplied and specified as much as we like, but which will all address the questions systematized as follows: How are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions?
(d) Generality
Finally, these historico-critical investigations are quite specific in the sense that they always bear upon a material, an epoch, a body of determined practices and discourses. And yet, at least at the level of the Western societies from which we derive, they have their generality, in the sense that they have continued to recur up to our time: for example, the problem of the relationship between sanity and insanity, or sickness and health, or crime and the law; the problem of the role of sexual relations; and so on.
But by evoking this generality, I do not mean to suggest that it has to be retraced in its metahistorical continuity over time, nor that its variations have to be pursued. What must be grasped is the extent to which what we know of it, the forms of power that are exercised in it, and the experience that we have in it of ourselves constitute nothing but determined historical figures, through a certain form of problematization that defines objects, rules of action, modes of relation to oneself. The study of modes of problematization (that is, of what is neither an anthropological constant nor a chronological variation) is thus the way to analyze questions of general import in their historically unique form.
A brief summary, to conclude and to come back to Kant.
I do not know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood. Many things in our experience convince us that the historical event of the Enlightenment did not make us mature adults, and we have not reached that stage yet. However, it seems to me that a meaning can be attributed to that critical interrogation on the present and on ourselves which Kant formulated by reflecting on the Enlightenment. It seems to me that Kant's reflection is even a way of philosophizing that has not been without its importance or effectiveness during the last two centuries. The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.
This philosophical attitude has to be translated into the labor of diverse inquiries. These inquiries have their methodological coherence in the at once archaeological and genealogical study of practices envisaged simultaneously as a technological type of rationality and as strategic games of liberties; they have their theoretical coherence in the definition of the historically unique forms in which the generalities of our relations to things, to others, to ourselves, have been problematized. They have their practical coherence in the care brought to the process of putting historico-critical reflection to the test of concrete practices. I do not know whether it must be said today that the critical task still entails faith in Enlightenment; I continue to think that this task requires work on our limits, that is, a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty.
Notes:
[1] Giambattista Vico, The New Science, 3rd ed., (1744), abridged trans. T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 370, 372.
[2] Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), p. 13.
[3] Charles Baudelaire, 'On the Heroism of Modern Life,' in The Mirror of Art, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1955), p. 127.
[4] Baudelaire, Painter, pp. 12, Il.
[5] Ibid., p. 12.
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