Introduction to Kant's Anthropology Michel Foucault

7/27/2019 Introduction to Kant's Anthropology Michel Foucault

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Introduction to Kant's Anthropology from a pragmatic point of

view Michel Foucault

Translated by Arianna Bove

Translator's Note

The following text is my translation of Michel FoucaultsComplementary Dissertation on Kants Anthropology from a pragmatic

point of view , presented as his doctoral research in 1961. The originalversion in French can be found here. Foucault translated Kants text

into French for Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin (Paris: 1964), but thisIntroduction was never published. It is now held at the Foucault Archivein Paris at the at the Institut de mmoires de ldition contemporaine(IMEC {D60/D61}). A much shorter version of this text, which merelypresents the intellectual context in which Kant elaborated his views onanthropology, appeared as the Introduction to Foucault's publishedtranslation in the Vrin edition of Kant's Anthropology . In my view, theimportance of the text that follows has been largely underestimated. Itis not only important as a scholarly appreciation of Kants oeuvre as awhole, but also because it outlines an explicit relation between whatwould later become Foucault's own main concerns and the history ofphilosophy as innovated by Kant. The notion of technology, the role oflanguage in an anthropological study of subjectivity, and the warningsagainst the dangers of a metaphysical treatment of epistemology arehere taken up by Foucault through an exegesis and criticalinterpretation of Kants tex t. Of great interest is Foucault's view on theproblematic relation between inner perception - Gemut - (as anempirical mode of knowledge) and being in the world, especially wherethis relation results into a philosophy of consciousness. Kant had asked:how can psychology help our pragmatic knowledge of man as a worldcitizen? Foucault takes up this question to level his criticism againststructuralist anthropology and the status of the human sciences inrelation to finitude, as will be further developed in The Order of Things , but through Kant, he also engages with the fallacy ofepistemology as metaphysics. Following Kants concern as expressed inthe Critique of Pure Reason , Foucault questions whether psychologyhas come to supplant metaphysics in man-centred reasoning.Foucault also takes on a further suggestion from the Anthropology concerning how any empirical knowledge of man is tied up withlanguage. The conclusion he draws from Kants text is that man is aworld citizen in so far as he speaks. For Foucault and Kant,anthropology is therefore concerned neither with the human animal norwith self-consciousness, but with Menschenwesen , the questioning ofmans limits in knowledge and concrete existence. [read more... ]
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This translation is incomplete and based on my manuscript which attimes resulted unclear. Only the first few pages of the original text aremissing, where Foucault historically contextualises Kant's text. Theywill be uploaded eventually, but I have given priority to what wasmissing from the published introduction, and what was of morephilosophical relevance. The paragraph headings are mine, as are the

translations of German terms. The original French version of theIntroduction can be found here (thanks to Marcio Miotto who made itavailable and Colin Gordon who checked the text). I am currentlyworking on improving the translation and would welcome anycomments or suggestions (simply write to ari at kein.org). In 2006 thistext came to the attention of various publishers and some of them willunfairly be capitalising on the work you see here. Hence, the licence. Ifyou are interested in the story, read on .

Introduction to Kant's Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view

This text took shape over a period of twenty five years, and the onlystage available to us, transformed in line with Kants thought as itbrings out new formulations, is the last one. [] Would the archaeologyof the text, if it were possible, allow us to see the birth of homocriticus, whose stru cture would essentially differ from the man whopreceded him? The Critique, with its own propaedeutic character inphilosophy, will play a constitutive role in the birth and becoming ofconcrete forms of human existence.Comparing what can be apprehended through the texts of theAnthropology with those of the Critique, one can hopefully see howKants later works are engaged with the series of pre -criticalresearches, with the whole enterprise of the Critique itself and alsowith the group of works which, in the same period, attempted to definea knowledge specific to man. Paradoxically this triple engagementmakes the Anthropology contemporary to what precedes the Critique,to what carries it out and also to what would soon eliminate it.For this reason, in the analysis of the work it is impossible to separatethe genetic perspective from the structural method: in its own space,in its final presence and in the equilibrium of its elements we aredealing here with a text that is contemporaneous to all of themovement that encloses it.The structure of the relations of the Anthropology to the Critique alonewill allow us, if correctly defined, to decipher the genesis that movestowards this last equilibrium- or last but one - if it is true that the OpusPostumum already walks the first steps on the finally rejoined soil oftranscendental philosophy.In 1797, Kant was working on The Conflict of the Faculties. One can seesimilarities in the analysis of temperament between the Observationson Beauty and the Sublime, dated 1764, and the Anthropology, dated1798. The perspective in the two works is without doubt entirelydifferent. In the Observations it is organised around moral sentiments their classification being seen then as a given, a matter of fact - whilstthe description in the Anthropology is ordered by a sort of deduction of
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the temperaments, starting with the tension and the release [dtente]of activity and of feeling. However the content is amazingly similarwhen it comes to expressions and choice of words.

Beilegung [insertion/settlement]Beck regards Beilegung the imputation of a representation as thedetermination of the subject to an object which differs from it and forwhich it becomes the element of knowledge [connaissance]. Kantremarks that representation is not reserved to an object, rather arelation to something other is devolved to representation and throughthe latter this relation becomes communicable to others.He also points out that the apprehension of the multiple and itssubsumption under the unity of consciousness is one and the same thingas the representation of what is only made possible through thiscombination. Only from the perspective of this combination can wecommunicate with one another: in other words, the relation to theobject renders representation valid for each and thereforecommunicable; this does not prevent the fact that we have to operatethe combination ourselves. The main themes of the Critique therelation to the object, the synthesis of the multiple, the universalvalidity of representation- are here strongly grouped around theproblem of communication.There the subject is not found as determined by the manner in which itis affected, but rather as determined within the constitution of therepresentation wir knnen aber nur das verstehen und anderenmitteilen, was wir selbst machen knnen [we can only understand andcommunicate with others, what we ourselves can do].

Inner sense.(1) The apperception on the one hand is defined, in a sensecloser to the Critique, by the consciousness of the understanding alone.It is not related to any given object or to any intuitive content: itconcerns nothing but an act of the determining subject and to thisextent it is to be accounted for neither by psychology nor byanthropology, but by Logic. Hence there emerges the great dangerevoked by Fichte of the division of the subject into two forms ofsubjectivity that can only communicate with one another within thedisequilibria of the subject-object relation. This is, as Kant recognises,the great difficulty: but one must be careful that the spirit is not adopplettes Ich, but a dopplettes Bewusstsein dieses Ich [a doubleconsciousness of these I].This debate allows one to define the space within which anthropologyin general is possible: that would not be the region within which theobservation of the self arrives to a subject in itself, nor to the pure Iof synthesis, but to a me that is object and present solely in its singlephenomenal truth. But this me/object, given to sense in the form of

Time, is not foreign to the determining subject since it ultimately isnothing but the subject as it is affected by itself, as an analysis of theconcrete forms of observation of the self. Put together, theunpublished and the published texts constitute, at two different levels,the unity of one course that simultaneously responds to Beck, conjuresup the Fichtean danger and denotes an exteriority, an empty space, asthe possible place for Anthropology. [creux]


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The discussions regarding the metaphysics of right. [Kant and Schutz]

Since the 16th century juridical thought has primarily been concernedwith the definition of the relation of the individual to the general formof the State, or of the individual to things within the abstract form ofproperty. In the second half of the 18th century, the relationship ofbelonging amongst individuals themselves in the concrete andparticular form of the couple, the family group, the household and thehome come under question: how can civil society, which thebourgeoisie presupposes as its own foundation and justification,particularise itself in these restricted unities, which do not follow thefeudal model, yet need not dissolve themselves at the moment of itspermanent disappearance?C. G. Schutz was concerned when seeing that in Kants Me taphysics ofright these relationships were too faithfully modelled on the majorforms of right [droit] over things. Kant doesnt give them a place in thesection entitled: Von dem auf dingliche Art persnlichen Recht, whichis divided into three domains, following the three essential forms ofacquisition - Erwirbt [to have gained]: namely man acquires woman,couple acquires children, family acquires domestics.Schutz refuses to believe that in the matrimonial relation the womanbecomes a mans thing. The form of satisfaction that, in the order ofmarriage, a man can get out of a woman does not reduce a woman to astate also primitively simple; the reification of another has no truthoutside of cannibalism: marriage and rights that are given do not turnpeople into res fungibiles. In brief, the problem that Schutz poses is brought back to theconstitution of this concrete islet of bourgeois society for which neitherthe right of the peoples nor the right of things can account for: aspontaneous synthesis that is not exhaustible by contract theory, nor bythe analysis of appropriation, fringes on the law where domination isneither sovereignty nor property.

In his protestation Schutz confuses the moral with the juridical point ofview, the human being with the subject of the law: a distinction that isre- established, in its rigour, in Kants response. But Schutzs objectiongoes to the very heart of the anthropological preoccupation; that is acertain point of convergence and of divergence of the law andmorality. The Anthropology is pragmatic in the sense that it does notenvisage man as belonging to the moral city of spirits (that would benamed practical), nor to the civil society of the subjects of law (thatwould be named juridical); he is considered as a citizen of the world,which means as a member of the concrete universal within which thesubject of law, determined by judicial rules and subjected to them,and is at the same time a human being who in his freedom carries hisuniversal moral law. To be a citizen of the world is to belong to a

certain region that is as concrete as an ensemble of precise judicialrules that are as universal as the moral law. To say that ananthropology is pragmatic and to say that it envisages man as a citizenof the world amounts to saying the same thing. Within these conditionsit will be the task of the Anthropology to show how a legal relation thatis of the order of possession, that is to say a jus rerum, can preservethe moral nucleus of the person taken as subject of freedom withoutcompromising it at the same time.paradox


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The right to be jealous up to the point of murdering is a recognition ofthe moral freedom of the woman; the first revendication of thisfreedom is to escape from jealousy, and to feel that one is more than athing in provoking a jealousy that will remain impotent before theirrepressible exercise of this freedom; then there emerges the right tomonogamy, gallantry, as the point of equilibrium between the jus

rerum that makes the woman her h usbands thing and of his moralitythat recognises in each person a subject of freedom.Moreover, a point of equilibrium does not mean a point of arrival nor anequitable sharing, for gallantry is nothing but an entangling ofpretentiousness: the mans pr etension to reduce the freedom of thewoman in the marriage that he hopes for; the womans pretension toexercise, in spite of marriage, her sovereignty over man. Thus, a wholenetwork is created where neither right nor morality are ever given intheir pure state; a network where they, intertwined, offer to humanaction its space of playing; its concrete latitude.This is neither the level of foundational freedom nor the level of therules of right. It is the appearance of a certain pragmatic freedom,where it is a question of pretension of cunnings, of fishy intentions, of

dissimulations, of undisclosed efforts to influence, of compromises andwaiting.Without doubt, there is a whole host of things that Kant makes allusionsto within the preface of the Anthropology. Here his declared objectiveis to determine what makes man, -or what he can and should do ofhimself as freihandelndes Wesen [free handling of being]: anexchange of freedom with itself and the manipulation of thecompromises of exchange can never be exhausted within the clarity ofrecognition pure and simple. By treating man as a freihandelndesWesen the Anthropology brings out a whole area of free -exchangewhere man lets his freedoms circulate as if from one hand to another:man socialises with others for a deaf and uninterrupted commerce thatprovides him with a residence on the whole surface of the world.

World Citizen.Dietetics.See the third part of the Conflict of the Faculties: the research done byHufeland helps Kant solve one of the difficulties that had not ceased toweigh on the Anthropology: how to articulate an analysis of what HomoNatura is on the basis of a definition of man as subject of liberty.

1. Anthropological thought will not claim to provide the definition of ahuman Wesen in naturalistic terms: Wir untersuchen hier den Menschennicht nach dem was er natrlicher Weise IST, [here we will examineman not as a natural being] as the Kollegenwurfe of 1770-80 hadalready stated. But the Anthropology of 1798 turns this decision into a

constant method: in a resolute desire to follow a path where man isnever expected to find himself absolutely within a truth of nature.The original meaning of the Anthropology is to be Erforschung [tr.:examination/enquiry]: an exploration, an ensemble never offered in itstotality, never in peace with itself because given within a movementwhere freedom and nature are entangled within Gebrauch, of whichour word of usage covers some of the senses.

2. Hence, not to study memory, but the way one makes use of it. Not


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to describe what man is, but what he can make of himself. This themehas been without a doubt, at the origin, the very nucleus ofanthropological reflection and the indication of its singularity. Such wasthe programme defined by the Kollegenwurfe. In 1798, it appearsmodified twice. The Anthropology will not try to know how one canuse man but what one can expect from him. On the other hand, it

will determine what man can and should do with himself. This meansthat the usage is taken out of the level of technical actuality andplaced within a double system: of obligation affirmed towards oneselfand of respectful distance towards the others. It is placed within thetext of a freedom that one posits at once as singular and universal.

3. This defines the pragmatic character of the Anthropology:Pragmitisch, the Kollegentwurfe said, ist die Erkenntnis von der sichein allgemeiner Gebrauch in der Gesellschaft machen lsst [is thediscovery from the self of a general usage society]. Then the pragmaticwas not understood as the useful given to the universal. In the 1798text, it becomes a certain mode of relation between the Knnen andthe Sollen [can and must/ought]. A relation that Practical Reason hadassured a priori in the imperative and that the anthropologicalreflection had guaranteed in the concrete movement of the dailyexercise: in the Spielen [playing]. This motion of the Spielen issingularly important: man is the game of nature, but he plays thisgame, and he plays with himself: and if he comes to be played, like inthe illusions of the senses, it means that he himself has played to be avictim of the game; whilst it is in his duty [appartient dtre] to bemaster of the game, of taking back unto himself the devises ofintention (2). The game then becomes a knstlicher Spiel and theappearance in which the game receives its moral justification. TheAnthropology is then deployed according to this dimension of thehuman exercise that feeds on the ambiguity of the Spiel (tr.: game=toy)and the ambiguity of the Kunst (tr.: art=artifice).

4. Book of the daily exercise, not of theory and of school. Thisopposition is irreducibly organised and within its lessons of theAnthropology, that are, after all, a school teaching, form afundamental tension: the progress of culture, in which the history ofthe world is summed up, constitutes a school that leads itself to theknowledge of and the practice of the world. The world is its ownschool; the anthropological reflection will have for meaning the placingof man in this constitutive element. Therefore [anthropologicalreflection] will be, together: an analysis of the way in which manacquires the world (its usage, its knowledge [connaissance]), thatmeans, how he can constitute himself in it and enter the game:Kittspielen; and synthesis of the prescriptions and rules that the world

imposes upon man, through which he is formed and that he puts intoplay to dominate the game: das Sollverstehen.The Anthropology will not be then a history of the culture, or ananalysis of its forms in succession; but a practice at once immediateand imperative of a fully given culture. It teaches man to recognise inhis own culture the school of the world. It is not the case that, incertain ways like a parent with his hilheim Meister, it reveals, also,that the world is a school. But what Goethes text and all theBildungsromane say for the course of history, the Anthropology repeats


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ad infinitum within the present form, imperious, always restarting fromthe daily usage. Time there reigns, but within the synthesis of thepresent.Here are some elements, at the same level as the Anthropology, thatare suggestive of the line of slope that is appropriate to it. At thebeginning, as the Kollegenwurfe testify, the Anthropology deploys itself

in the accepted division of nature and man, of freedom and utility andof school and world. Its equilibrium is at the moment found in theiradmitted limits, without them being ever posed into a question, evenless so at the anthropological level.It explores a region where freedom and utility are already tied withinthe reciprocity of usage; where the ability and the duty belong to theunity of a game that measures one against the other; and where theworld becomes school within the prescriptions of a culture. We touchupon the essential: Man, in the Anthropology, is neither homo naturanor the subject of freedom; he is given within the already operatingsyntheses of his relation with the world.But if the discourse of the Anthropology has remained foreign to thework and the word of the Critique, will the 1798 text be able to say

what was not said in the Kollegenwurfe?Something of the knowledge of the world is then wrapped with thisknowledge of man that is Anthropology. The preface to the text of 1798assigns itself as its object man as resident in the world, the Weltbrger.The Anthropology, at least until the last page, hardly ever seems totake as privileged theme the examining of man as inhabitant of theworld: of man establishing, through the cosmos, the laws and theduties, the reciprocities and the limits and exchanges of citizenship.And this lacuna is even more perceptible in the edited/published textthan in the fragments of the Nachlass. The greater part of the analyses,and approximately all those of the first part, is developed, not in thecosmo-political dimension of the Welt, but in that interior of theGemt. In that, moreover, the Anthropology remains within the same

perspective where Kant has placed it in order to make emerge,according to an encyclopaedic organisation, the link to the threeCritiques. If it is true that the Gemt is the question of theAnthropology or the primary element of its exploration, one hasgrounds to pose a certain number of questions:

How a study of Gemt allows knowledge of man as citizen of the world.

If it is true that the Anthropology analyses, on one side, the Gemt,whose irreducible and fundamental faculties determine theorganisation of the three Critiques, what then is the relationship ofanthropological knowledge to the critical reflection?In what does the investigation of Gemt and of its faculties differ from

a psychology, be it rational or empirical?To this last question, the texts of the Anthropology and of the Critiqueof Pure Reason seem to answer directly, even though they do notprovide a complete reply. One knows the distinction established by theArchitectonic between Rational Psychology and Empirical Psychology.The first belongs to pure philosophy, hence to metaphysics, and is thusopposed to rational physics as the object of the inner senses is to theobject of external senses.With respect to Empirical Psychology, a long tradition has made it


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necessary for it to be placed within metaphysics, and furthermore, therecent failures of metaphysics have been able to make one believe thatthe solution of the insolvable problems is concealed in thepsychological phenomena that pertain to an empirical study of the soul;and thus psychology has confiscated a discouraged metaphysics withinwhich it had already taken an improper place.

An empirical knowledge cannot, in any case, provide the principles orclarify the fundaments of a knowledge derived from pure reason andconsequently entirely a priori. Empirical Psychology will then have tobe detached from metaphysics, to which it is foreign. And if suchdisplacement cannot be made within the immediate, and given that itis necessary to prepare psychology for its stay in an empirical scienceof man within an Anthropology that will balance the empirical scienceof nature, all seems clear in this abstract organisation.Therefore, the Anthropology, as we can read it, has no place for anypsychology, whatever that would be. It is given explicitly as a refusal ofpsychology, in the exploration of the Gemt, which does not intend tonor claim to be knowledge of the Sele [soul]. In what does thisdifference consist?

a) From a formal point of view, psychology postulates an equivalence ofinner sense and apperception, without knowing their fundamentaldifference, given that apperception is one of the forms of pureknowledge, - hence without content, and solely defined by the I think(cogito), whilst the inner sense designates an empirical mode ofknowledge, that we make appear to ourselves in the ensemble of thephenomena tied to their subjective condition of time.

b) From the point of view of the content, psychology cannot avoidbeing trapped in the interrogation of change and identity: does the soulremain itself within the incessant modification of time? Do theconditions of experience that it makes of itself, and the necessarilytemporal progress of phenomena need to be considered themselves asaffectations of the soul that exhausts itself in the phenomenaldispersion, or does the soul retire on the contrary in the non-empiricalsolidity of the substance? All these questions show, in different light,the confusion between the soul, metaphysical notion of a simple andimmaterial substance, the I think, that is the pure form, and theensemble of phenomena that appear to the inner sense.

These texts of the Anthropology are situated in the direct obedience tothe Transcendental Dialectic. What they denounce is precisely theinevitable illusion that the paralogisms accoun t for: we make use ofsimple representation of the I, that is devoid of any content, in orderto define this particular object that is the soul. However, it isnecessary to point out that the paralogisms are neither concerned withrational psychology, nor with empirical, and that they leave open thepossibility of a sort of psychology of inner sense the contents of whichare dependent on the conditions of all possible experience. On theother hand, rational psychology can and should subsist as a discipline,allowing escaping both materialism and spiritualism, and marking anavoidance of this speculation zum fruchtbaren praktischen Gebrauch[faisant sign de nous dtourner de cette spculation]. Consequently,and despite the fact that it seems to be excluding all forms of possible


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psychology, the Anthropology does not put out of the way what hadalready been denounced in the Critique of Pure Reason. Without sayingit, it is towards rational psychology that it takes its distance.In so far as it leaves two options open, one empirical psychology andone discipline gone back towards the practical usage what are itsrelations to the Anthropology?

Firstly, nothing in the text of the Anthropology makes one suppose thatan empirical psychology or a rational psychology as a discipline can befounded elsewhere, at the outer margins or in the proximity of theAnthropology itself: there is no indication of a close exteriority.But inversely, no element, no section, no chapter of the Anthropologyis given as a discipline planned by the Dialectic or as this empiricalpsychology perceived on top of the Methodology.Does this lead to the conclusion that the Anthropology, for a sliding ofperspectives, has become itself, at once this transcendental disciplineand this empirical knowledge? Or on the contrary has it rendered/madethem forever impracticable at the outset?Is it the Gemt itself that needs to be interrogated now, whether it is

or not in the order of psychology?It is not Sele, but on the other hand, it is and it is not Geist. To bediscrete, the presence of Geist in the Anthropology is no less decisive.This definition is truly brief and does not seem to promise much: Geistist das belebende Prinzip im Neuschen, a banal sentence, and one thatmaintains in its triviality this example of daily language.

We are dealing with a Prinzip [principle]. Neither with a Vermogen[faculty] such as memory, attention or knowledge (connaissance) ingeneral nor with one of the forces (Krafte) mentioned in theIntroduction to the Critique of Judgement. Not even, finally, with asimple representation such as the pure I of the first Critique.Therefore, a principle: but is it determining or regulative? Neither one

nor the other, if one has to take seriously this invigoration(vivification) that he partakes in.

In the Gemt, in the course in which it [tr.: the principle] is given toexperience or within its virtual totality- does one have something thatrelates it to life and that pertains to the presence of the Geist? Andhere a new dimension opens up: Gemt is not merely organised andequipped with powers and faculties that share in its domain; the greattripartite structure in which the Introduction to the Critique ofjudgement seems to provide the definitive formulation, cannot be butwhat, of the Gemt, can appear within experience. Like all livingbeings, its duration does not scatter within an indifferent dispersion; ithas an oriented course, something in it that projects it, without

stopping it, towards a virtual totality.

Nothing is clearly indicated to us as to what this principle itself is. Butwhat we can take hold of, is the reason why this invigoration takesplace, the movement through which the Geist gives to the spirit thefigure of life. Durch Ideen [throug h ideas], the text says. What doesthis mean? In what can a necessary concept of reason, to which noobject of correspondence is given in sensibility (Cassirer) give life to


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The movement that, in the Critique, gives rise to the transcendentalmirage is that which in the Anthropology makes pursue the empiricaland concrete path of the inner sense (Gemt).

Consequences:A. An Anthropology is only possible in so far as the Gemt is not fixedto the passivity of its phenomenal (phenomenic) determinations, butrather it (the Gemt) is animated by the labour of ideas at the level ofthe field of experience. The Geist then will be the principle, within theGemt, of dialectics de-dialecticised, non transcendental, turnedtowards the domain of experience and being one with the very game ofphenomena. It is the Geist that opens to the Gemt the freedom of thepossible, the uprooting (arrache) of its determinations and gives it afuture that it does not owe to anything but itself.B. One understands that, basically, the Anthropology has renderedimpossible an empirical psychology and a knowledge of the spiritcompletely developed at the level of nature. It will always only be ableto return to a drowsy spirit, ine rt, dead and without its belebendesPrinzip. This will be a psychology minus life. Witness the preface to

the text of 1798. The possibility of a non-pragmatic anthropology isrecognised in theory and within a general system of the knowledge ofman. But indicated on grounds of symmetry in the structures, it ischallenged as content of knowledge: the study of memory as a simplenatural fact is not only useless, but also impossible: all theoreticalreasoning on this subject is in vain.' (4)The presence of the Geist, and with it, of this dimension of the libertyand of the totality that transcends the Gemt, is such that there can beno truthful anthropology that is not pragmatic, each fact is then takenwithin the open system of Knnen and of Sollen. And Kant finds noreason to write of any other [system].

C. Within these conditions, doesnt the Geist deal with this enigmaticnature of our reason and then with the question of the Dialectics andof the Methodology of Pure Reason?This is the disconcerting notion that seems to suddenly refer theCritique, once reached its apex, towards an empirical region, towards adomain of facts where man will be doomed to a very original passivity[longe]; will be given all of a sudden to the transcendental; and theconditions of experience will be related finally to the primary inertia ofa Nature. But does this nature of reason here play the same role asthe nature of human understanding in Hume: of primary explication andfinal reduction? For the moment let us just point out an analogy ofstructure between this nature that pushes reason to leave anempirical usage in favour of a pure usage, without howevercontaining in itself (is it not pure and simple nature?), illusions of

originary prestige, and the con crete life of the spirit such as it isdescribed in the Anthropology: this too is animated by a spontaneousmovement that exposes it ceaselessly to the danger of being playedwithin its own game, but that deploys itself always within an initialinnocence. One and the other are always ready to lose themselves, toescape from themselves, but for all that, in their very movement, [theyalso are] the supreme tribunal of all rights and of all pretensions.

D. If this analogy is founded, one could ask whether the Geist, which is


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designated at the margins of the anthropological reflection, is not anelement secretly indispensable to the structure of Kantian thought:something that will be the nucleus of pure reason, the un-rootableorigin of its transcendental illusions, the infallible judge of its return toits legitimate patria, the principle of its movement within the field ofthe empirical, where the faces of truth arise tirelessly. The Geist will

be this original fact that, in its transcendental version, entails that theinfinite is never there, but always in an essential withdrawal, and in itsempirical version, that the infinite animates therefore the movementtowards truth and the inexhaustible succession of its forms.

The Geist is the root of the possibility of knowledge.

And, for knowledge itself, it is the inextricable presence and absenceof the figures of knowledge: it is this withdrawal, this invisible andvisible rserve within the inaccessible distance of which knowing andtakes place and acquires positivity. [The nature of] its being is of a notbeing there, designating, in itself, the locus of truth. This original facthangs over its structure unique and sovereign, the necessity of theCritique and the possibility of the Anthropology.

What relations authorize within these two forms of reflection thisradical element that seems their common being? To be honest thedifference of level between the Critique and the Anthropology is suchthat it discourages, at the beginning, the undertaking of theestablishment of a structural comparison of one with the other. As acollection of empirical observations, the Anthropology has no contactwith a reflection on the conditions of experience. And therefore, thisessential difference is not of the kind/order of a non-relation. A certaincrossing analogy lets one half-see in the Anthropology like a (photo)negative of the Critique.

a) The relations of the synthesis and of the given are presented in theAnthropology alongside the universal image of what they are within theCritique. Take subjectivity, for instance. On this point, theanthropological analysis has hesitated for a long time. The texts of theperiod between 1770 and 1780 link the expression of the I to thepossibility of being an object for itself. But it is not clearly decidedwhether the root of this possibility is the I itself, or the objectifying itallows. The Cri tique will take that decision: The I can never beobject, but only form of the synthesis. Or in the text of 1798, the I isnot considered in its fundamental synthetic function, without for allthat finding again a simple object status. It appears and it suddenlyfixes itself in a figure that will remain unchanging in the fieldexperience. This incidence of the spoken I marks the passage offeeling to thought -from Fuhlen [feeling] to Denken [thinking]- withoutbeing either the real agent or the simple coming to consciousness ofthis passage, it is the empirical and manifest form within which thesynthetic activity of the I appears as a figure already synthesized, asstructure inextricably primary and secondary: it is not given to man toenter the gam e, in a sort of a priori of existence (elle nest pas donnedentre de jeu lhomme, dans une sorte da priori dexistence); butwhen [the I] appears, it inserts itself in the multiplicity of a temporalsensibility, it offers itself as already there, as the irreducible


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foundation/bottom of a thought that cannot operate but this figure ofalready constituted experience: it is within this I that the subject willcome to recognize its own passage and the synthesis of its identity. Inother words, what is an a priori of knowledge from the point of view ofthe Critique is not immediately transposed in the anthropologicalreflection as an a priori of existence, but appears within the density of

a becoming where its sudden emergence takes infallibly, in retrospect,the meaning of the already-there. The structure is inverted by theoriginal dispersion of the given. According to the anthropologicalperspective, the given is not in fact ever offered according to an inertmultiplicity indicative in an absolute fashion of an originary passivityand calling on its diverse forms the synthetic activity of conscience.The dispersion of the given is always already reduced in theanthropology, secretly dominated by a whole series of syntheses carriedout apart from the visible workings of conscience: it is the unconscioussynthesis of the elements of perception and of obscure representationsthat even the light of understanding always to dissociate, that are theschema of exploration that trace, within space, the kind of insularsyntheses; that are in sensitivity the reorganisations that allow for the

relation of one sense to another; that are finally the reinforcementsand the weakening in the sensible effects that anticipate, asspontaneously on the voluntary synthesis of attention. Thus what theCritique welcomes as the infinitely thin surface of a multiple that hasnothing in common with it apart from being originally given islightened, for the Anthropology, by an unexpected depth: alreadygrouped and organised, having received the provisional or solid figuresof the synthesis. What is for knowledge the merely given, is not offeredas such in concrete existence. For an Anthropology, passivity that isabsolutely originary is never there [does not exist]. Thus the relationbetween the given and the a priori takes on, in the Anthropology, aninverted structure with respect to that which has been employed in theCritique. The a priori in the order of knowledge, becomes, in the order

of concrete existence, an originary that is not chronologically primary,but which, as soon as it appears in the succession of figures of thesynthesis, reveals itself as already there; on the other hand, what isgiven is lightened, in the reflection on concrete existence, by softlights that give the depth of the already operated.

b) The Anthropology follows the division of the faculties Vermogen-that the Critique admits too. However, the domain that it privileges isnot that of where the faculties and powers positively manifest whatthey have. On the contrary, it is the domain where they manifest theirweakness or at least the dangers/perils where they risk of losingthemselves. What is indicated, more than their nature or plain forms oftheir activity, is the movement for which, to move away from their

centre and justification, they want to alienate themselves in theillegitimacy. Without doubts the Critique, in its fundamental project ofpropaedeutics, intended to denounce and dismantle the transcendentalusage of reason but with a constant reference to the domain ofpositivity of each Vermogen [faculty]. In the anthropological researcheach faculty follows a line/track that is also the path of all possibledeviations. Self-consciousness, for example, is not defined as a form ofexperience and condition of limited but founded knowledge; it appearsrather as the always re-emerging temptation of a polymorphous


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egoism: the possibility of saying I gives rise, in consciousness, to theprestige of a me good -soul (moi bien -aime) that fascinates it, to theextent that, in a paradoxical return, consciousness will renounce thelanguage of this first person as decisive as to what has been (aussidcisive cependant quil ait t) to decline itself in the fiction of aWe. The study of sensibility, whilst reworking the great critical

opposition of Schein [appearance] and Erscheinung [phenomenon], doesnot explore what can be held as well-founded in the phenomenon, butwhat has something at once fascinating and precarious within thefragment of appearance, since the latter veils what it makes shimmer(dangle), and also comes to transmit what she steals.The long analysis of deficiencies and diseases of the spirit follows abrief paragraph on reason; and the increasing importance given to theconsiderations on mental pathology in the notes and projects - up tothe developed text of 1798 attests to the fact that these reflectionson negativity have been in the line of force of the anthropologicalresearch. [In relation] to the Critique, [an investigation of what isconditioning in foundational activity] it represents the investigation ofthe unconditioned within the conditioned. In the anthropological

region, there is no synthesis that is not threatened: the domain ofexperience is almost emptied of content by dangers that are not of theorder of arbitrary supersession, but of the collapsing on itself. Possibleexperience defines equally well, in its limited circle, the field of truthand the field of the loss of truth.

c) One detail finally has its importance. All the Kollegentwurfe and thetext published by Starke, however late, presents two parts as generalplan to the Anthropology: one Elementarlehre and one Methoderlehre.The text of 1798 offers likewise two sections; but one is a Didactic, theother a Characterisation. This change, which occurred without date inthe last years, is all the more surprising since the content and theordering seem not to have been modified at all, the distinction

between one doctrine of elements and one doctrine of method goeshand-in-hand with the critical research: on the one hand, that whichconstitutes the faculty of understanding, and on the other, that whichgoverns its exercise in the domain of possible experience.Apparently, the Anthropology is cased according to the same model: atthe beginning, the different faculties in the organisation form thetotality of the Gemt: Elementarlehre; then, the rules of their exercisein the individual, within a family, inside a people or a race, internal tohumanity: Methoderlehre. But this is no doubt a false opening: anadjustment to the norms of the Critique that would not correspond tothe vocation of the text.The terms of the Didactic and the Characteristic that appear in the laststage of reflection, and that substitute the traditional distinction, are

curiously accompanied by subtitles of which one can hardly see therelation they have with the title. For the Didactic, [the subtitle] is onthe art of knowing the interior as well as the exterior of man; for theCharacteristic , on how to know the interior of man [starting] from hisexterior. Is this change a reorganisation of the whole, a distancing inrelation to the Critique? No, without doubt.[Rather, it must be] the discovery of what has already been, obscurely,and prior to all explications, the thematic of the Anthropology: toknow, the immediate coordination that permits that research in the


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dimension of Gemt does not only open on the interior knowledge ofthe self, but also extends beyond itself, and spontaneously, withoutpassing the limit of extrapolation, [it also extends] on knowledge ofman in the exterior forms the manifest it.So much the term Elementarlehre has been imposed by the symmetryof the Critique, that the analysis of Gemt can only be conscious of

itself in the space of a research of powers, in the virtuality ofVermogen and at the root of the possible. Disengaged in its veritablesignification, this exploration knows that in dealing with the interior, itannounces at the same time the exterior: that man does not dispose ofhis possibilities without being engaged, at the same time, in theirmanifestations.What the Critique distinguishes as the possible within the order ofconditions (Vermogen [faculty]) and the real within the order of theconstituted (Erscheinung [phenomenon]) is given by the Anthropology inone inextricable (insecable) continuity: the secret of Power is revealedin the luminosity of the Phenomenon, where it finds at once its truthand the truth of its perversion (since the use becomes abuse, as in thelanguage in the first person), and is denounced in its perversion by the

Phenomenon, power is imperially recalled to this radical truth thatbinds it to itself in the mode of obligation. This is what gives eachparagraph of the first part this obscurely tertiary rhythm: Power at theroot of its possibility, Power found and lost, made possible andbetrayed in its Phenomenon, Power imperatively tied to itself.(5)For instance, self-consciousness, egoism, effective consciousness ofrepresentations; or more, the imagination as power of originalinvention, imagination in the fantastic shipwreck of dreaming,imagination in the poetry tied to the sign. Or again: the power to desirewith ones emotions; the false truth of passions; the plac e of thesupreme good. From Vermogen [faculty as ability/wealth/potential] toErscheinung [Phenomenon], the relation is at once of the order ofmanifestation, of the adventure of perdition, and of the ethical

connection. It is precisely where this articulation of Knnen [be ableto] and Sollen [ought to] resides, as we have seen, that what isessential to anthropological thought [is found]. The art of knowing theinterior as well as the exterior of man, is then, in full right, not atheory of elements, but a Didactic: it does not discover withoutteaching.With regards to the Characteristic, it reveals that the groups ofphenomena the bodies, the couple, race, the species- are not givenonce and for all and [] on themselves, but rather they come backfrom the apparently static truth of phenomena to the radicalpossibilities that give them meaning and movement; allowing to goback from the sign to power, das Innere des Menschen aus demAusseren zu erkennen [to recognise the inner of man from its outside]. To the model of the Critique, that has imposed itself for a long time,follows an articulation that repeats it as a negation: the theory of theelements becomes prescription with regard to all the possiblephenomena (what has been properly speaking the end of theMethodenlehre); and inversely the theory of method becomesregressive analysis towards the primitive nucleus of powers (that wasthe meaning of the Elementarlehre): a mirroring reproduction.So simultaneously close and distant are the regions where the a-prioriof knowledge is defined and where the a-priori of existence is


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determined. What is enunciated in the order of conditions appears, inthe form of the original, like same and other.

The relation between the Critique and the Anthropology: thestructure

In so far as this far proximity appears more clearly, the questionbecomes more insisting of knowing what relation is establishedbetween the Critique and the Anthropology.Two texts are of singular importance: a passage regarding psychology inthe transcendental Methodologie to which we have already referred;and one very enigmatic indication that appears in the Logic. (6)

The architectonics of pure reason.(7)

From the point of view of pure philosophy (that wraps the Critiquewithin the Propaedeutics), no place is made for the Anthropology. Therational Physiology that considers Nature as Inbegriff aller

Gegenstande der sinne knows nothing but Physics and RationalPsychology. On the other hand in the vast field of empirical psychology,two domains balance each other out: that of a Physics and that of ananthropology that will have to accommodate (welcome) the morerestrained edifice of an empirical psychology. (8)With regard to the first, [there is] not the rigorous symmetry betweenpure philosophy and empirical philosophy. The correspondence thatgoes immediately for the Physics is not carried out in details.The Anthropology, unlike Psychology, only appears on the empiricalside; it cannot therefore be regimented or controlled by the Critique,in so far as the latter concerns itself with pure knowledge. But morethan Newtonian physics it has no need for a critical reflection in orderto identify and verify itself: the Anthropology, in order to constituteitself and occupy the place that he had granted to the Architectonic,will not have resorted to a prior Critique.There is not then a possible critical influence on the form or content ofan Anthropology. The contact between one and the other form ofreflection is null. Isnt all this negative ly further confirmed by theAnthropology itself? Nowhere is the prior Critique invoked: and if thecorrespondence of the two texts is easily visible, it is never given norreflected upon as such. It is buried in the text of the Anthropologywhere it forms the framework; and one has to envisage it as a fact, likea structural given, not as the manifestation of a prior and intentionalordering.

The Logic .

We know the three fundamental interrogations accounted for in thetranscendental Methodology:What can I know? a speculative question to which the Critique answerswhere reason has to limit itself; what must I do? a question that ispractical; what can one hope for? an interrogation at once theoreticaland practical.

These three questions that hang over and, to a certain extent,


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command the organisation of critical thought, can be found at thebeginning of the Logic, but affected by a decisive modification. Afourth question appears: what is man? which only follows on from thefirst three in order to take hold of them again in a reference that wrapsthem all: because they all have to relate themselves to that one; asthey should all be accounted for by the Anthropology, the Metaphysics,

the Ethics and the Religion.Doesnt this sudden movement tha t knocks off balance the threeinterrogations towards the anthropological theme betray a rupture inthought?Philosophieren seems to be able to deploy itself exhaustively at thelevel of a knowledge of man; the largely empirical status that the firstCritique assigns to the Anthropology is, by this very fact, challenged: itis no longer the last empirical stage of a knowledge organisedphilosophically, but the point where philosophical reflection comes toculminate into an interrogation of the interrogations themselves.However, one needs to be careful not to hurry this point, neither in thedenunciation of a so-called rupture affecting this transcendentalresolution of criticism, or in the discovery of a hypothetical new

dimension along which Kant would approach at last that to which hehad originally been the closest.And first, what does their relation to the fourth question mean for thethree? (sich bezeihen auf)Are we to understand this relation as that of knowledge to its object,or as that of this same knowledge to the subject -if it is true as a textof the Logic claims that knowledge has eine zwiefache Beziehung:erstlich, eine Beziehung auf das Objekt, zweitens eine Beziehung aufdas Subjekt? [a twofold relationship: to the object and to the sub ject]In other words, are we to comprehend that in these three questions,man was obscurely the Gegenstand (sensible concrete object)? Thattowards whom they would disclose themselves and who stands oppositethem, ready to give the unexpected answer that they solicit in another

language?Or rather are we to think on the contrary that these three questionsought to be in their turn interrogated, surrounded in their power byquestioning and reinstalled, by a new Copernican revolution, in theiroriginal gravitation around man, who naturally believes himselfquestioned in them, at the moment when it is him who asks them andwho is concerned with asking them in relation to himself (to dissipateall philodoxia)?Let us just note, to begin this examination, that the Anthropology aswe know it does not lend itself at any moment to answer the fourthquestion, not even as the empirical exploitation of the question in itsbroadest sense; but that the question is only posed much later, outsideof the Anthropology, and within a perspective that does not belong to itproperly, the moment when in Kantian thought the organisation ofPhilosopheren totalises itself, that is to say in the Logic and in the Opuspostumum.It is in the light of the answers provided, in these texts, to: Was ist derMensch? that we would try to understand, on the path of retour, thatwhich the Anthropology wants to say.


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What is man? The Opus Postumum

The texts of the Opus Postumum that are dated in the period of 1800-1801 tenaciously repose, with regards to the division of transcendentalphilosophy, the definition of the relation between God, the world andman. What might seem to us a rupture or discovery in the text of theLogic, reveals itself then as the fundamental interrogation ofphilosophical reflection, regains scope both in the rigour of its limitsand in its greater extension.

A fragment attests to this: System der transcendental Philosophie indrei Abschnitten: Gott, die Welt, universum, und Ich selbst der Menschals moralisches Wese n. However, these three notions are not given asthe three elements of a planned system that juxtaposes them along ahomogeneous surface. The third term is not there as a complement: itplays the central role of medius terminus; it is the concrete andactive unity in which and for which God and the world find their unity:Gott, die Welt, und der Mensch als Person, d.i. als Wesen das dieseBegriffe vereinigt as beings which unites this concepts. One must leaveto the fragments of the Opus Postumum their tentative character, andthrough the haunting repetition of the themes, take ear to thisdivergence that makes a body with the originary unity of the effort.What is the correct meaning of this unification of God and the world inman and for man? What synthesis or what operation confronts it? Can itbe situated at the level of the empirical or of the transcendental, ofthe originary or of the fundamental?

a) Certain texts point to it as the very act of thought. If man gives unityto the world and God, it is in so far as he exercises his sovereignty as athinking subject- thinking the world and thinking God: Der mediusterminusist hier das urteilende Subjekt (das denkende Welt -Wesen,der Mensch)

b) This unifying act is then the synthesis itself of thought. But it can bedefined exactly in this sense starting from the power where it takes itsorigin: Gott und die Welt, und der Geist des Menschen der beidedenkt [God and the World, and the spirit of man thinks the two ofthem]; where everything is thus well considered in its sole form, as ifwith God, the world and man, in their coexistence and theirfundamental relations, the structure itself of judgement is broughtback onto the regime of traditional logic; the trilogy Subjekt,Praedikat, Copula define the figure of the relation between God, theworld and man. [Man is then] that which is then the copula, the link-like the verb to be of the judgement of the universe.

c) Finally man appears as the universal synthesis, forming the real unitywhere the personality of God and the objectivity of the world, thesensible and supra-sensible principle, come to rejoin; and man becomesthe mediator starting from which ein absoluter Ganze [an absolutetotality] is designated. Starting from man, the absolute can be thought.Answers or solutions? These texts should not be regarded as either.Rather, they are possible paths and tests for a thought that advanceson the ground of a finally attained transcendental philosophy. And at


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each instant, every time the geography of these new territories needsto be located, the interrogation on man emerges as the question towhich the entire problematic of the world and God cannot avoid to berelated to.But this relation to the question on man does not have the value of anabsolute reference, thus freeing a serenely fundamental thought from

the content itself of the question: Was ist Mensch? It cannot bedeployed within an originary autonomy: because of the entry to thegame, man is defined as the inhabitant of the world, asWeltbewohner [world inhabitant]; Der Mensch gehort zwar mit zurWelt [man really belongs to the world]. And all reflection on man isbrought up again circularly into a reflection on the world. Therefore, itis not about pointing to a naturalist perspective whereby a science ofman entails a knowledge of nature. Rather than to the determinationsin which the human beast is taken and defined at the level ofphenomena, what this pertains to is the development of self-consciousness and of the I am: the subject is affected in the movementthrough which it becomes object of itself: Ich bin. Es ist eine Weltausser mir (praeter me) im Raume und der Zeit, und ich bin selbt ein

veltresen; bin mir jenes ver haltnisses beurisst und der bevengendenKrafte zu Empfindungen (Wahrnehmungen). Ich der Mensch bin mirselbst ein ausseres Sinnenobjekt, ein Teil der Welt. The world isdiscovered in the implications of the I am, as a figure of thismovement for which the me, in becoming object, takes place in thefield of experience and finds there a concrete system of belonging.Then this world thus disclosed is neither the Physis, nor the universe ofvalidity of the law. And to be honest what is disclosed to it isanticipated and made possible by the transcendental Analytics and theRefutation of Idealism, but it is not exactly the same world, or ratherthe world in the same sense, that is in question in the fragment of theOpus Postumum. The exterior things of the Refutation of Idealismhave been the conditions of the determination of Time as a form of

inner experience; the world of the Opus postumum is concomitant tothe determination of me as objective content of experience in general.And in place of it being defined by the perseverance, and obstinacy(Beharrliches) of a spatial coexistence, [the world] is sketched out inthe bending of a tout that permits it to be, for the experience of a me,more wrap (envelopment) than landmark. It is no longer correlative ofa Zeit-bestimmung (9), but the precondition (le presuppose) of aSinnenbestimmung of me. It is not given at the opening of the whole; itis present in the flexion on the (me) self of Ganz .It is no longer easy to talk of this world. The accomplishment of theclosure of this folding seems to entail the exclusion of language, and ofits primary form that is predication: a text of the Opus postumum talksabout personality as a predicate of God; but it makes illegible(achoppe) what the predicate of the world ought to be by way ofsymmetry. And this predicate remains unfilled (en blanc), on this sideof language, because the world, as a whole (Ganz) is beyond (au-del)all the predications and maybe at the root of all the predicates.However, this world is not without structure and signification. Itsopposition to the universe allows one to fix its meaning in atranscendental philosophy.


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The world and the universe in the Opus Postumum .

Differently from the universe, the world is given within a system ofactuality that envelops all real existence. It envelops existence becauseas well as being the concept of its totality, starting from the world,existence develops its concrete reality: a double meaning enclosed inthe very world Inbegriff [epitome]. Der Begriff der Welt ist derInbegriff des Dasein [the conc ept of the world is the complex ofexistence]. The world is the root of existence, the source that, bycontaining it, simultaneously retains and frees it.

2) One can only have by definition one universe. The world, on theother hand, could be given in numerous examples (es mag viele Weltesein). The universe is the unity of the possible, whilst the world is asystem of real relations. This system is given once, and it is not possiblefor the relations to be other [than what they are]; but absolutelynothing impedes to conceive an other system or other relations to bedefined differently. This is to say that the world is not the open spaceof the necessary, but a domain where a system of necessity is possible.

3) But however lawful this supposition is (es mag), one cannot avoidrecognising that there cannot be but one world: Es mag nur Eine Weltsein. Because the possible is only thought starting from a system givenby actualit; and the plurality of worlds is only delineated starting froman existing world and from what can be offered to experience: theworld is das Ganza aller moglichen Sinnen Gegenstander. Thecorrelative of the possibility of conceiving of other worlds, -wherebythe world is nothing but, de facto, a domain- consists in theimpossibility of surpassing it and the imperious necessity of acceptingits frontiers as limits. Thus the world, taken back in its signification asInbegriff des Daseins appears according to a triple structure,conforming to Begriff der Inbegriff, of source, of domain, and limit.

This is then in the Opus postumum the world where man appears tohimself. Or, going back to the Logic, the place where we had left him:this is to say, the time when the three questions had been referred tothe one: what is man? This question, in its turn, does not remain stableand fixed on the vacuum that it designates and interrogates. Straightfrom when the was ist der Mensch is formulated, three otherquestions emerge; or rather three imperatives of knowledge areformulated that give to the anthropological question its character ofconcrete prescription: Der Philosoph muss also bestimmen Knnen:

Die Quellen des menschlichen wissensDer Umfang des moglischen und naturlichen Gebrauches alles wissensUnd endlich die Grenzen der Vernunft.

[The philosopher must be able to determine: the source of humanknowledge, the extension of possible and useful use of humanknowledge, the limits of reason.]

What do they mean, and what are these three prescriptions in whichthe interrogation on man is distributed related to? It is easy to


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recognise, at the watermark of these three themes, both thereconsideration of the first three questions, and the sketch of what willbe in the Opus postumum the fundamental structure of the Inbegriffdes Daseins.On the one hand, in fact, the determination the sources of humanknowledge give (contenu) meaning to the question: what can I know?;

the determination of the domain of the possible and natural usage ofknowledge indicates what could be the reply to the question: whatshall I do?; and the determination of the limits of reason give itsmeaning to that what is possible to hope. The content, oncespecified, of the fourth question is then not fundamentally differentfrom the meaning that the first three questions had; and the referenceto them in the end does not entail either that the former disappear inthe latter, nor that they point towards a new interrogation that hassurpassed them: but simply that the anthropological question poses bytaking them back - the questions that relate to itself. We are here atthe level of the structural foundation of the anthropological-criticalrepetition. The Anthropology does not say anything more than what theCritique says; it is sufficient to go through the text of 1798 to see that

it overlaps exactly the domain of the critical undertaking. A paradoxical repetition: source, domain and limit.

However, the meaning of this fundamental repetition does not have tobe asked either to the repeated word or to the language that itrepeats: but to that towards which this repetition goes. This is to say,towards the disclosure of this ternary structure in which the question inthe Opus postumum and that characterises the Inbegriff of Daseins is:source, domain and limit. These concepts are common to the themesthey specify, in the Logic, in the fourth question, and to which theygive meaning in the last Kantian texts, to the notion of world as whole(tout). They determine the structural belonging of the interrogation onman to the questioning of the world. And here we find it in the rigorousundertaking (reprise) of the three questions that dominate the threeCritiques. In other words, these three notions, Quellen (source),Umfang (domain), and Grenzen (Limit), already present in the web ofcritical thought, for their own perseverance and weight, have reachedthe fundamental level where the Inbegriff of existence is interrogated,and where they appear finally to themselves (pour elles-mmes). At themore superficial level, they are given as common forms of theinterrogation on man and the meaning (signification) of the world. But,without doubt, at the level of transcendental philosophy where finallythey are formulated, they have a whole different import. Wasnotwendig (ursprunglich) das Dasein der Dingen ausmacht gehort zurTranscendental Philosophie. [What necessarily makes up the existence

of things belongs to Transcendental Philosophy]. Or what necessarily(originally) belongs to the existence of things, is this fundamentalstructure of its Inbegriff that we already know. The wealth of thesource, the solidity of the domain and the rigour of the frontier areinseparably linked to what it has as a necessity (this is to say originary).The totality of existence thinks as Ganz (entirety) and not as Alles(tout).And through this is disclosed, in its fundamental character, therelationship of man and the world, -this relation that seemed locked


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within the indefinite repetition of its circularity, since the world hadbeen unified by man, who hadnt been but an inhabitant of the world.Doesnt a text of the Opus postumum say: Der Mensch in der Weltgehort mit zur Kenntnis der Welt [Man in the world belongs withknowledge of the world]?But these paradoxes are at the level of natural knowledge. At the level

of a transcendental philosophy they dissipate immediately to let acorrelation emerge where the whole of existence defines what belongsto it necessarily and originally.

The world, as source of knowledge, offers itself on the space of themanifold that designates the originary passivity of sensibility; but thissource of knowledge is inexhaustible precisely because this originarypassivity is indissociable from the forms of Vereinigung [merging] ofspontaneity and of the spirit. If the world is source, it means that it hasa fundamental correlation, beyond which it is impossible to go backinto passivity and spontaneity [on the background of a transcendentalcorrelation between passivity and spontaneity].

The world, as domain of all the possible predicates, offers itself in thegripped solidarity of a determinism that sends back to a priorisyntheses of a judging subject (eines urteilenden Subjekt). And by thesame token, the world is only domain in relation to a founding(fondatrice) activity that opens itself on/to freedom; and consequentlyder Mensch gehort zwar mit zur Welt, aber nicht der seiner PflichtAngermessene [on the background of a transcendental correlationbetween necessity and freedom ](10).

The world, as limit of possible experience, excludes all transcendentalusage of the Idea. But it is only limit because there exists a certainnature of reason whereby the labour is one of anticipation on thetotality, and of thought precisely as limit, in so far as it is proper to theambiguity itself of this notion to designate the frontier too easy tocross, and the inaccessible term where one is always approached reallybut in vain. The ambiguity is well expressed in this fragment: Gottubermir, die Welt ausser mir, der menschliche Geist in mir in einem systemdas All der Dinge befassend.

One sees the scope of the field of reflection that covers these threenotions: source, domain and limit. In a sense, they match the trilogyinternal to the first Critique, of sensitivity, understanding and reason.Later, they resume and strengthen in one word the work of eachCritique: pure reason, practical reason and faculty of judgement. Theyrepeat the three fundamental questions which, according to Kant,animate all philosophy. Finally, they provide a triple content to theinterrogation on man to which they relate all others. But by resumingeach of these tri-partitions, they put on hold, by their very repetition,the level of the fundamental, and substitute to these systematicdivisions the organisation of the transcendental correlatives. Thus onenotices that the world is not simply source for a faculty of sensation,but the foundation of a transcendental correlation between passivityand spontaneity; that the world is not simply the domain for a syntheticunderstanding, but the basis of a transcendental correlation between


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necessity and freedom; that the world is not just limit for the use ofIdeas, but the basis of a transcendental correlation between reason andspirit (Vernunft-Geist). And here, within this system of correlation thereciprocal transcendence of truth (vrit) and freedom is founded. Onesees what the place of the fourth question is within the economy ofKants later work, in other words, within the passage from a critical

reflection hence necessarily propaedeutic- to the accomplishment of atranscendental philosophy. The anthropological question is not ofindependent content; to be explicit, it repeats the first threequestions, but it repeats them by substituting to a tri-partition thatmore or less directly follows the distinction of the faculties(Vermogen), the play of the three notions that account for the relationsof man and of the world: no longer empirical and circular relations ofimmanence at the level of a natural knowledge (connaissance), butnecessary correlation, in other words, originary- necessity (notwendig,ursprunglich)- that develop at the root of the existence of things, ofinseparable transcendences.The meaning and function of the question: what is man? consists in thebringing of the divisions of the Critique to a level of fundamental

cohesion, that of a structure which in its most radical aspect thanthat of all possible faculties- offers itself to the word (parole) and isfinally liberated from transcendental philosophy.Therefore, we are not at the end of our path. Or rather, at this stagewe are already too far on the path that should have taken us to theexact situation of the Anthropology to the place of its birth andinsertion in critical thought. As if the Anthropology became impossible(at the level of a fundamental rather than merely programmaticpossibility) unless taken from the point of view of a Critique completedand already lead to accomplishment by a transcendental philosophy.But we also find: the question what is man? is given in the Logic asthe anthropological interrogation par excellence; and therefore in theOpus postumum it is linked, from the beginning, to an interrogation on

God and on the world; the question is developed entirely at this levelas if it had never pertained to this singular domain that is theAnthropology. The reference of the Logic to an anthropology thatreduces to itself all philosophical interrogation seems to be nothingmore, in Kantian thought, than an episode. An episode within ananthropology that does not have any claim to such universality ofmeaning and a transcendental philosophy that takes the interrogationon man at a much more radical level. This episode has been structurallynecessary: its passing character was linked to a passage that reassuresit.The relation of the 1798 text to the Critique is thus paradoxical. On theone hand, the Critique announces it and makes it pace inside of anempirical philosophy; hence the Anthropology does not refer back tothe Critique, or to the principal organising elements laid out by it. Onthe other hand, the Anthropology refers back to, as its own drive, thegreat articulations of the Critique, and the division, becometraditional, of the faculties; hence, despite this implicit and constantreference, the Critique only has foundational value in relation to theAnthropology, which in turn rests on its work but does not root itself init. It is divided of itself towards what it ought to bring together(fonder) that is no longer the Critique, but transcendental philosophy


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itself. It is the function and the web of its empirical status.

This empiricity must now be attended to /followed in itself. What, foranticipation, we have been able to determine of its path will allowwithout doubt to better understand how the Anthropology was able tobe at once marginal in relation to the Critique, and decisive to theforms of reflection that offer themselves as goals to achieve it. TheAnthropology itself asserts that it is at once systematic and popular;and it is by dwelling on these two words that we can decipher its ownproper meaning: in repeating the Critique at a popular level of advice,of story and of example secretly heading Kantian thought towards afounding reflection.

Empiricity and Time

1. The Anthropology is systematic: which is not to say that it enunciatesall that can be known of man, but that it forms, as a knowledge, acoherent whole: no longer Alles, but Ganze. The Principe of thistotality is not man himself, as an already coherent object, because heis linked to the world, and only the indefinite labour of enquiry, thewear (usure) of the frequentation (Umgang) [of the world] will be ableto research find out what he is. If the Anthropology is systematic it is inso far as it borrows its coherence from all of the thought of theCritique, -each of the three books of the Didactic repeat the threeCritiques, and the Caracteristique refers back to the texts on history,the becoming of humanity and its path towards inaccessible goals.There, and only there, resides the organising principle of theAnthropology.

[There is] one example to determine how exactly this repetition occurs:the text entitled Apology of sensitivity refers to the relation betweenintuition and understanding. This repetition is not a going back to thesame. The relation described by the Anthropology has its owndimension within the slow, precarious and always doubtful labour ofthe succession: the manifold as it offers itself to the senses is not yet(noch nicht) ordered; the understanding must come to add itself(hinzukonsmen) and insert an order that it supplies itself(hineinbringen). A judgement that is produced before this orderingactivity [putting into order (zuvor)] risks being false. On the otherhand, this relation of succession does not put up with/withstand beingextended with impunity; if, in the order of time, the retrospectivereassessment of reasoning (Nachgrubeln) and the indefinite folding(repli) of reflection (Uberlegung) intervened, the error could equallyslip. The given is therefore never deceptive, not because it judges well,but because it doesnt judge at all, and what judgement inserts withintime, forms truth according to the measure of this time itself. The timeof the Critique, form of the intuition and of the inner sense, onlyprovides the multiplicity of the given through an activity alreadyconstructive at the outset; it only offers the diverse already dominatedwithin the unity of the I think. On the other hand, the time of theAnthropology is guarantor of an insurmountable dispersion; becausehere the dispersion is no longer that of the given and sensible passivity;it is the dispersion of synthetic activity in relation to itself dispersionthat offers itself as a jeu. Its (dispersion) is not contemporaneous to


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itself in the organisation of the manifold; it inevitably succeeds/followsitself, thus giving rise to error (donnant ainsi prise lerreur), and toall the slippings that have been made (Ver Kunstein, Verdichten, Verruchen). Given that the time of the Critique had reassured the unity ofthe originary (from the originally given until the originary synthesis),thus deploying itself at the level of the Ur, the Time of t he

Anthropology remains doomed to the domain of the Ver, because itmaintains the dispersion of the syntheses and the always renewedpossibility of seeing them escaping from one another. Time is not thatin which, and through which, and because of which the synthesis ismade. It is that which gnaws at the synthetic activity itself.

However, it affects it not in the manner of a given that indicates aprimary passivity, but in the way of an intrinsic possibility that raisesthe hypothesis and the threat of an exhaustive determination: that thepossibility of error is linked to the duty, and to the freedom, ofavoiding it.

What affects the synthetic activity -the opening to this freedom- iswhat limits it placing it, for the same fact, in an indefinite domain. Inthe Critique, time becomes transparent to a synthetic activity that wasnot temporal itself, since it was constituent; in the Anthropology,dispersed time mercilessly obscures and renders impenetrable thesynthetic acts, and substitutes to the sovereignty of the Bestimmung[determination], the patient, friable and compromised incertitude ofan exercise that is called Kunst .

The word Kunst, with its derivatives (verkunstein, erkunstein,gekunstelt), is one of the terms that frequently recur in theAnthropology and one of those that remains the most inaccessible totranslation. Neither art nor technique are concerned there; but ratherthe fact that nothing is ever given without being at the same timeoffered to the danger of an undertaking that is simultaneously theground in the construction, and the dodging in the arbitrary.Kunst is in a sense the negation of originary passivity; but this negationcan and must be comprehended also as spontaneity (in relation to thedeterminations of the diverse) as well as artifice (in relation to thevalidity of the given); moreover, its role is that of building - above andcounter to/against the phenomenon (Erscheinung)- an appearance(Schein), as well as giving to appearance the plenitude and meaning ofthe phenomenon: this is to say that the Kunst retains (dtient), -morein the form of freedom-, the power of reciprocal negation of Schein andErscheinung.Equally, the deeper the layers are buried in originary passivity, themore there is in the sensible given that is open to this game offreedom: the content of sensible intuition can be utilised artificially asSchein; and this Schein can be used intentionally, as Erscheinung: thusin the exchange of signs of morality, the sensible content can benothing but a mask and it is in the service of the cunnings of a lie; oralso it can be cunning of the cunning and refined form that transmitsthe value, and as simple appearance, the seriousness of thephenomenon. Then, the Kunst that, in proximity of the sensible (au rasdu sensible) already inhabits the whole domain of the given, exercisesits sovereignty in three ways: it is the puissance/power of the negative,


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it is the decision of the intentional, it is the language of exchange.

Time, Kunst and the Subject: a relation between truth and freedom.

Thus the time that eats into and crumbles the unity of the syntheticact, and dooms it to a diverse, where it can never rejoin/meet itself inan a-temporal sovereignty, opens it by the very fact, to a liberty that isnegation to exercise, without offering itself, communication, toestablish, dangerous freedom that links the work of truth with thepossibility of error, but makes thus escape from the sphere ofdeterminations the relation to truth. To the relation of time and thesubject, that has been fundamental in the Critique, corresponds in theAnthropology the relation of time to Kunst.

In the Critique, the subject had self-consciousness (conscience de soi)as determined in time, and this insurmountable determination refersback to the existence of an external world in relation to which an innerexperience of change had been possible; this is to say that time, andthe primary passivity that it indicates, had been the root of thisBeziehung auf [relation to] that characterises the first opening of allknowledge. In the Anthropology, time and the dispersion it determines,show in the texture of the Beziehung auf a reciprocal belonging(appartenance) of truth and freedom. From the Critique to theAnthropology, is it not the same thing that is repeated? Time receivesand reveals a relation to a pri mary opening that is, consequentlyand simultaneously, a connection between truth and freedom. This linkwill be, in its turn, the privileged theme of transcendental philosophy,and the interrogation that animates the relentless question of the OpusPostum um; Was ist der Mensch?. As the Beziehung auf [relation to] becomes visible in the Critiquethrough the structure of Vorstellung [imagination], so the connection oftruth and freedom starts to be deciphered in the Anthropology, throughthe labour and the dangers of Kunst.

The Anthropology is systematic. Systematic by virtue of a structure thatis that of the Critique, and that the Anthropology repeats. But what theCritique states as determination, in the relationship between passivityand spontaneity, the Anthropology describes along a temporaldispersion that is never ended and never starts, what the Anthropologydeals with is always already there, and never entirely given; what isprimary for the Anthropology is doomed to a time that completelyenvelops it, from far and high. This is not because the problem oforigins is foreign to it: on the contrary, time gives it back its truemeaning, that it is not of disclosing and isolating, in the instant, theoriginary; but of finding again a temporal web that, having alreadybegun, is not less rooted [radical]. The originary is not the reallyprimitive. It is the truly (vraiment) temporal. This is to say that theoriginary is where, in time, truth and freedom belong to each other.One can have a false/ wrong Anthropology and we know it too well: itis that which attempts to shift towards a beginning, towards anarchaism of fact and of right, the structures of the a priori. KantsAnthropology offers us another lesson: to repeat the a priori of the


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Critique in the originary, i.e. in a truly temporal dimension.

2. Despite this systematic deep-rootedness (enracinement), theAnthropology is a popular work: where examples can be found by eachreader. What is meant by this? Neither a certain nature of the content(an empirical analysis can only be popular), nor a certain quality of theform (a non popular knowledge can receive a garment that makes itaccessible). A text of the Logic offers a definition of the notion ofPopularitat. In relation to knowledge, it is not an addition, epithet, orstyle of expression: it is perfection eine populare Vollkommenbeitdes Erkenntnisses. It distinguishes itself from technical and scholasticperfection: not that it is not compatible with them, on the contrary,but they add something to it because in the discourse of scholasticknowledge one can never be sure that the proof is noteinseitig[biased/one -sided], there is, on the other hand, in popularknowledge an exigency of discourse that goes towards the whole,towards the exhaustive and dissipates the danger of particularity, thusauthorising, eine Vollstandige Einsicht [a complete view]. Its owncharacter lies not so much in the particularity of a style, but in themanner of administering the evidence; its arguments are no better (norother) than those of scholastic savoir, - its truth is the same, but itoffers the certitude that the whole is given in the inexhaustiblemultiplicity of the diverse. The various proofs offered never give theimpression of being particular. Which is what the Anthropology wantsto say itself: the reader finds himself in such environment of totalevidence (Vollstandige Einsicht) that he can indefinitely find newexamples. But the popularity is not the primary, earliest and the mostnave form of truth.

In order to become popular a knowledge must rely on eine Welt -undMenschentkenntniss, a knowledge of concepts, of tastes and ofinclinations of men. How come, in this sentence of the Logic that

circumscribes the requirements of popular knowledge, the definition ofanthropology is not found? This is to say that the Anthropology, asoeuvre of popular form, relies on itself in so far as it is knowledge ofman and the world.As popular knowledge and knowledge of the popular, it is whatimplicates itself in order to exist.

This circle is not about unravelling, but taking as it is given and whereit is given, -in language- what resides in language: the possibility atonce to speak it and to speak about it, and to do so in one and thesame movement; in the current usage lies the inexhaustible source ofthese examples, through which the writing extends towards thereader, without interrogation and in the familiarity of the recognised.

To say that a text is popular because the readers can find examples forthemselves, is to say that one finds between the author and its publicthe undivided basis of daily language that continues to speak, withouttransition and without changes, the page that once was blank.The Anthropology, popular knowledge, can rely on itself, since it speaksa common language, it will speak of him and, of the interior, willclarify it. It will be a knowledge of man that man himself will be ableto immediately comprehend, recognise, and indefinitely extend,because man and that knowledge are within the obedience of one


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inexhaustible language.Differently from the non popular texts, the Anthropology does not tryto fix and justify its vocabulary. On the contrary, it welcomes languagein the totality of a practice that is never put back into question. In theweb of the texts, the empirical guiding thread is different from thepatient effort to exhaust the verbal forms of a theme, and to give to

each, in its precise meaning, the real extension of its domain. Withinthe classification of mental illnesses in the 18th century, terms such aseinfaltig, dumm [stupid], tor, narr [fool], Geck [fop], and unklug [idiot]are challenged as mystifying and vain, only relevant to a popular usagefounded solely on the obscurity of a dubious tradition; one erases themfor the sake of a terminology that is supposed to reproduce a logicalarticulation of the real within the space of nature. But these are wordsthat, for Kant, form the support and the substance itself of analysis. Itis not at all a matter of providing a silent Logos of nature with a prolificlanguage of

Introduction to Kant's Anthropology Michel Foucault

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Transcript of Introduction to Kant's Anthropology Michel Foucault