Foucault’s Kant

“Love as an inclination cannot be commanded” (GMS 4: 399), but “respect is a tribute that we cannot refuse to pay to merit, whether we want to or not” (KpV 5: 77). Kant’s works are cited by volume and page number in Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, ed. German Academy of Sciences (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902 – ). Abbreviations: Anth = Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Br = Correspondence, EEKU = First Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment, GMS = Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, KpV = Critique of Practical Reason, KrV = Critique of Pure Reason, Log = Logic, MS = The Metaphysics of Morals, OP = Opus Postumum, PG = Physical Geography, R = Notes and Fragments, SF = The Conflict of the Faculties, V-Anth/Busolt = Anthropology Busolt, V-Anth/Collins = Anthropology Collins, V-Anth/Fried = Anthropology Friedänder, V-Anth/Mensch = Anthropology Menschenkunde, V-Anth/Parow = Anthropology Parow, V-Met-L2/Pölitz = Metaphysics Pölitz, Second Set, V-PP/Herder = Practical Philosophy Herder, VvRM = Of the Difference Races of Human Beings. When available, I follow (with occasional slight modifications) the translations in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Other translations are my own.

Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in Paul Rabinow, ed., A Foucault Reader (Pantheon Books: New York, 1984): 32-50, at 42; The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France 1982-1983, ed. Frédéric Gros and trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 21.

James Schmidt and Thomas E. Wartenberg, “Foucault’s Enlightenment: Critique, Revolution, and the Fashioning of the Self,” in Michael Kelly, ed., Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge, MA; The MIT Press, 1994): 283-314, at 283. Cf. Habermas: “In Foucault’s . . . [“What is Enlightenment?”], we do not meet the Kant familiar from The Order of Things, the epistemologist who thrust open the door to the age of anthropological thought and the human sciences with his analysis of finiteness. Instead we encounter a different Kant – the precursor of the Young Hegelians, the Kant who was the first to make a serious break with the metaphysical heritage, who turned philosophy away from the Eternal Verities and concentrated on what philosophers had until then considered to be without concept and nonexistent, merely contingent and transitory” [“Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present,” in Kelly, ed., Critique and Power: 149-56, at 150].

Enterprising scholars, however, were able to consult Foucault’s “complementary thesis” at the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne in Paris, and, partly as a result, it was discussed in several articles and books before 2008. At least one unofficial translation was also available on the web prior to 2008.

E.g., toward the end of the text, Foucault speaks critically of “the anthropological illusion” – a “web of confusion and illusion anthropology and contemporary philosophy are tangled up in” [Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, ed. Roberto Nigro, tr. Roberto Nigro and Kate Briggs (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 122, 121; Introduction à l’Anthropologie (published in one volume with Foucault’s translation of Kant’s Anthropologie du pont de vue pragmatique), ed. Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Frédéric Gros (Paris: Vrin, 2008), 77, 76. Future references to this text (abbreviated as IKA) are cited in the body of the text by page number. The first number refers to pagination in the English translation; the second to the original French edition. I have occasionally made minor changes in the English translation.

E.g., Béatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, tr. Edward Pile (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), xi ff. Foucault’s own title was simply Introduction à l’Anthropologie. For a commentary on Kant’s Anthropology in the traditional sense, see Reinhard Brandt, Kommentar zu Kants Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798), Kant-Forschungen, Band 10 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1999).

Immanuel Kant, Vorlesungen über Anthropologie, ed. Reinhard Brandt and Werner Stark (Berlin: DeGruyter, 1997) (= vol. 25 of Kant’s gesammelte Schriften); Lectures on Anthropology, ed. Allen W. Wood and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Foucault, “Notice Historique,” in Kant, Anthropologie du pont de vue pragmatique, tr. Michel Foucault, 3^rd ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1979), 10n.16.

See, e.g., Barbara Herman, “Could It Be Worth Thinking About Kant on Sex an Marriage?” in L. Antony and C. Witt, eds., A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993).: 49-68; and Allen W. Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 256-59.

See Schütz’s letter to Kant of May 22, 1800, Br 12: 307.

“Marriage cannot . . . be subsumed under the concept of contract; this subsumption – which can only be described as disgraceful – is proposed by Kant’s Metaphysical Elements of the Theory of Right” (Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood and tr. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §§ 75R, cf. 161A.

“My examples . . . cannot be drawn from other people’s experiences, but, in the first instance, only from what I have experienced in myself, for they come from introspection” (SF 7: 98).

Gemüt also appears a few more times as part of compound nouns such as Gemütsschwächen (Anth 7: 202), Gemütskrankeiten (Anth 7: 161, 202, cf. 251), and Gemütsstörung (Anth 7: 217), and once in the genitive as part of a section title (Von der Regierung des Gemüts in Ansehung der Affekten – Anth 7: 253; cf. 246).

Similarly, toward the end of the Anthropology Kant remarks that what the human species will do “cannot be inferred a priori from what is known to us about its natural predispositions, but only from experience and history” (Anth 7:329). Here too he indicates that anthropology’s proper concern with human nature rests not on a priori considerations but rather on “experience and history.”

“Starke” was actually a pseudonym used by Johann Adam Bergk (1769-1834). For discussion, see my Translator’s Introduction to the Menschenkunde transcription in Lectures on Anthropology, 283-87. Some of the transcriptions dated after Menschenkunde, e.g., Mrongovius (1784-85) and Busolt (1788-89) do employ the Didactic/Characteristic terminology (see 25: 1208, 1437, 1530), as does Dohna (1791-92), which is not reprinted in Academy vol. 25. Brandt and Stark, in their Introduction to Kant, Vorlesungen über Anthropologie, argue that “the putting together of the two parts of the Anthropology . . . is a historical accident” (“Einleitung,” 25: xxx). For related discussion, see my “Divisions of Anthropology,” in Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 70-71.

Brandt, Kommentar zu Kants Anthropologie, 16. Kant’s claim that “What is the human being?” is the most important question reflects a larger “anthropological turn” in Enlightenment thought, and echoes earlier statements by Hume, Hutcheson, Rousseau, Pope, and others. For references and discussion, see Robert B. Louden, Kant’s Human Being: Essays on His Theory of Human Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 165-66n.1.

Foucault’s strategy here may have something to do with the fact that the Jäsche Logic was first published in 1800. The Jäsche Logic and the Opus postumum are thus both in a sense “late” works, and Kant continued working on the latter text (which remained unfinished at his death in 1804, and which was not published in its entirety until 1938) after the former was published. However, as J. Michael Young notes in his “Translator’s Introduction” to Kant, Lectures on Logic, tr. J. Michael Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), “there are many reasons to treat Jäsche’s manual with caution,” one reason being that some of the material used by Jäsche in editing Kant’s notes “had been compiled over a period of forty years” (xvii; see also xviii-ix, xxvii).

E. A. Chr. Wasianski, Immanuel Kant in seinen letzten Lebensjahre (Königsberg, 1804), 283; Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 413. For a more positive contemporary assessment, see Eckart Förster, Kant’s Final Synthesis: An Essay on the Opus postumum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

As Nigro notes in his “Afterword” to Foucault’s Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, Martin Heidegger’s text, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics “no doubt . . . had a considerable influence on” Foucault, even though Foucault “makes no reference to Heidegger in the Introduction” (Roberto Nigro, “Afterword: From Kant’s Anthropology to the Critique of the Anthropological Question: Foucault’s Introduction in Context,” in IKA, 127-139, at 134). The Heideggerian influence is particularly noticeable in Foucault’s attempts to draw connections between Kant’s Anthropology and the first Critique. See, e.g., Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5^th ed., enlarged, tr. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), §36. However (as Nigro also notes), Foucault does call “Heidegger’s own interpretation of Kant into question” (Nigro, “Afterword,” in IKA, 134). Space limitations prevent me from pursuing this important issue in further detail at present. But for brief discussions of Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant’s Anthropology, see Robert B. Louden, “Kant’s Anthropology: (Mostly) Empirical Not Transcendental,” in Der Zyklop in der Wissenschaft: Kant und die anthropologia transcendentalis, ed. Francesco Valerio Tommasi (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2018), 19-33; and Anthropology from a Kantian Point of View (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

However, Kant does endorse the popular view of the time that French is “the universal language of conversation” and that English is “the most widely used language of commerce” (Anth 7: 312).

Cf. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1990), Sec. 210 and The Anti-Christ, Sec. 11 [in Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Book, 1990)]. For related discussion, see my “Phantom Duty? Nietzsche versus Königsbergian Chinadom,” in Nietzsche and Kantian Ethics, ed. Tom Bailey and João Constancio (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 193-218.

Cf. Nietzsche, Morgenröte: Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurtheile [Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, ed. Maudmarie Clark and Brian Leiter, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)].

See also V-Anth/Pillau 25: 734 and V-Anth/Mron 25: 1213 (these transcriptions also predate the publication of Schmid’s book).

Vorlesungsnachschrift Reichel, p. 3, as cited by Brandt and Stark in their “Einleitung” to the Vorlesungen über Anthropologie, 25: xi n.1. Kant also issues negative judgments about Baumgarten in several of his Reflexionen. E.g.: “Baumgarten: the man was sharp-sighted (in little things) but not far-sighted (in big ones)” (R 5081, 18: 82-82; cf. R 5125, 18: 99). For further discussion of Baumgarten’s influence on Kant’s Anthropology, see Holly L. Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology: Its Origin, Meaning, and Critical Significance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 17-23. Wilson argues convincingly that “Baumgarten’s psychologia empirica gave at most the form of . . . [Kant’s anthropology] lectures, but not the content” (19).

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, in The Portable Age of Reason Reader, ed. Crane Brinton (New York: Viking Press, 1956), 57-59, at 57.

Béatrice Han-Pile, Review of Foucault, Introduction à l’Anthropologie, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2009.03.14, n. 5.

See, e.g., Beyond Good and Evil, Sec. 21. Cf. Foucault’s famous remark in his “Truth and Power” interview: “One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself” [Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 117.

Or, as Foucault puts it later in The Order of Things: “Rather than the death of God – or, rather, in the wake of that death and in a profound correlation with it – what Nietzsche’s thought heralds is the end of his murderer; it is the explosion of man’s face in laughter, and the return of masks” (385; cf. 263). David Macey, in The Lives of Michael Foucault: A Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), suggests that Foucault may also have been influenced by the following remarks of Althusser: “We have all taken to heart these words from A. Malraux: ‘At the end of the century, old Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God. It is now up to us ask ourselves about ourselves, and to ask whether man might not be dead henceforth” (90). However, as Macey himself recognizes, Foucault and Malraux are clearly not using “the ‘death of man’ trope in precisely the same way” (90) – Malraux abhors the death of man; Foucault delights in it. The expression “the death of man” was used in different ways by twentieth-century French intellectuals, and Foucault was not the first to use it.

Ibid., 114.

Cf. Negri’s “Afterword,” which approaches the Introduction not via Kant’s works but from the perspective of what happens when “the question of anthropology is suddenly inscribed within the force field of contemporary philosophy” (IKA, 132). See also Han-Pile, who concludes her discussion of the Introduction by noting that “the main interest of this Foucauldian reading of the Anthropology does not lie in its potential contribution to Kantian studies” (Foucault’s Critical Project, 32).

Colin Koopman, “Historical Critique or Transcendental Critique in Foucault: Two Kantian Lineages,” Foucault Studies 8 (2010): 100-21, at 106. See also Amy Allen: “I shall argue that Foucault . . . offers us a continuation-through-transformation of the Kantian critical project” [“Foucault and Enlightenment,” Constellations 10 (2003): 180-98, at 183]. And Ian Hacking: “Foucault was a remarkably able Kantian” [“Self-Improvement,” in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Hoy (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 238].