Sapere Aude?

Every now and then it is useful to survey the course one has taken in order to chart one's progress—even if only to answer a question made famous by David Byrne, "well, how did I get here?" Occasionally, we turn around and take in the view and to get a sense of how far one has traveled. In order to achieve this, we usually require what is commonly called a "landmark," one that is clearly visible in order for the vista of the way taken to emerge against the profile of the past. On this occasion, and in response to the question of how we got here, I will choose for my landmark a small brief that was written some twenty years ago by Foucault shortly before his death. I think many will be familiar with this text; it has the advantage of being visible at some point in the last twenty years, and this is why I have chosen it for this exercise.¹

In 1984 Foucault himself was engaged in very much the same survey I have just described and chooses for his landmark a text written by Kant two hundred years earlier in 1784.² Here, from our current vantage point, we might imagine that we are standing on this peak and looking back at Foucault on some distant peak, who has his back to us and is looking arrears at Kant; who, in turn, is not perceivable to us from where we are now. Between ourselves and Kant there is a vista that we have called "Modernity," even though we only have a theoretical knowledge of its entire expanse, and parts of it are entirely hidden from us, and this makes us dependent in some ways on Foucault's description of that stretch of the road, among others.

Speaking of the first stretch, the part that we cannot see, how does Foucault describe it? Taking up this question, in the following response I will limit my remarks to four observations on Foucault's reading of Kant in 1984, each observation followed by some remarks on how this might help us understand where we are today, especially with regard to what I might call our current critical ethos.

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My First Observation concerns the notion of the limit attitude, or what Foucault describes as the dominant critical ethos of Enlightenment. First of all, the famous motto—Sapere Aude!—must be understood as being composed of two distinct voices: the voice of Kant, and that of Fredrich II. (Foucault reminds us that Kant's little article was written for a newspaper, that is, constituting an address before the public whose rhetorical occasion would have to be analyzed in terms of the emerging discourse of philosophical journalism, or what we would today call the discourse of the "public intellectual.") Second, given our understanding that the above motto is being expressed by two distinct voices, it is crucial to see that each voice addresses a different limit of critique: a critical attitude that is later described in terms of a public barrier or guardrail against what Foucault will define as the character "philosophical despotism" (i.e., the absolute freedom of critique as an inherent condition of Enlightenment rationality).

The first sense of limit that the voice of Kant addresses is epistemological and can be translated as "Have the courage to know the limits of your knowledge." As Foucault remarks, the famous freedom to think has less to do with what we undertake in the act of thinking, or in the act of critique (with more or less courage), than it does with the direct apprehension of ourselves within the limits of our own knowledge. In other words, the realization of ourselves as beings who are thoroughly determined by the limits of "what we can know," in turn, inaugurates a spirit of permanent critique of ourselves within the creation of our autonomy (as a "subject," a "people," even as a "Humanity"). As a result of this radical limit attitude that the Enlightenment supposedly inaugurates, History will henceforth appear as both the absolute horizon of the present and as that unconscious region from...