Foucault and the Indefinite Work of Freedom

Conclusion: The Indefinite and Undefined Work of Freedom as History

Neither a postulate nor a presupposition , freedom is the work of history. This is the basic claim of the philosophy of history as I understand it. Turning one’s attention to history—to the fact that our existences take place within the temporal unfolding of the past, the present and the future—involves considering the changing shapes the world has taken as the distinct sphere of our own becoming. And that distinctiveness lies in its being freely taken up as human beings continue to be born into the world. However compelled we may be to do what we find ourselves doing, that compulsion is never simply a given: it is taken up and made sense of, if not always wholly by ourselves, then by the others that sustain the space within which what we do happens. I have not argued in this book that Foucault himself is explicitly making this The Indefinite and Undefined Work of Freedom as History CONCLUSION 388 Conclusion claim. He has not been presented as proposing a philosophy of history. He seems to have been content with having his work oscillate between the claims of historical investigation and those of philosophical elucidation, thereby creating a unique interrogative space that continues to interpellate us. But I have sought to show that his work does help us get a clearer view of this basic claim of the philosophy of history . given the philosophical underpinnings explored in Part A and given certain key features of the histories explored in Part B, his work places us in a better position to make sense of history and to account for ourselves as free. Foucault connected his own sense of freedom, of our free being, to the critical work of a philosophical ethos that sets itself the task of testing the limits of what is given us to think, say and do.1 As I mentioned when I first introduced the expression that forms the title of this book, it is because Foucault ties the notion of freedom to this critical work that I think a more appropriate translation of “indéfini” is indefinite rather than undefined, in the sense that it is a kind of work that must be taken up ever anew, that it has no term or end, that it is in being indefinitely engaged 1. Cf. “What Is Enlightenment?” EW 1 315–19. Freedom as History 389 that our freedom manifests itself, however fleetingly. Of course, the fact that freedom should merely manifest itself, and fleetingly at that, within our busy engagements and commitments, within what we are given to think, say and do, also points to its “undefined” character, that is, its lack of definition, or at least of a definition that would fix it once and for all. One might say, then, that the “indefinite work of freedom” Foucault calls for, on the one hand, emphasizes the Hegelian sense of history as an unfolding process we need to make sense of and which makes sense of us (and thus appeals to the principle of immanence); while, on the other hand, as “undefined”, recalls Heidegger’s reminder of the “free letting-be” at the heart of our engagement in the world (and thus appeals to the principle of rarity). I think the connection Foucault makes between a critical work of engaging with the limits that are given to us (in a selfconsolidating discursive present) with the freedom that lies at the core of all of our engagements is important for the speculative philosophy of history. It reminds us that the historical realm, the realm of our engagements with the world and with each other, is a distinct one which can never be fully known because, in its temporal unfolding, it remains constitutively 390 Conclusion incomplete: the past it considers arises out of present concerns which, as ongoing, point to a future. Thus, the speculative philosophy of history is less an attempt to know something—the pattern, the process, the meaning of history—than one of situating our engagements within this intelligibly changing realm we call history. John McCumber, in a variety of places but perhaps most relevantly here in his work Reshaping Reason: Toward a New Philosophy,2 argues that taking time more seriously is philosophy’s most urgent task. Philosophy needs to recognize the radically temporal character of reasoning , whose task it is, precisely, to situate us in our unfolding relation to the world...