Michel Foucault

What Is Enlightenment?

Today when a periodical asks its readers a question, it does so in order to 
collect opinions on some subject about which everyone has an opinion already; 
there is not much likelihood of learning anything new. In the eighteenth 
century, editors preferred to question the public on problems that did not yet 
have solutions. I don't know whether or not that practice was more effective; it 
was unquestionably more entertaining.

In any event, in line with this custom, in November 1784 a German periodical, 
Berlinische Monatschrift published a response to the question: Was ist 
Aufklrung? And the respondent was Kant.

A minor text, perhaps. But it seems to me that it marks the discreet entrance 
into the history of thought of a question that modern philosophy has not been 
capable of answering, but that it has never managed to get rid of, either. And 
one that has been repeated in various forms for two centuries now. From Hegel 
through Nietzsche or Max Weber to Horkheimer or Habermas, hardly any philosophy 
has failed to confront this same question, directly or indirectly. What, then, 
is this event that is called the Aufklrung and that has determined, at least in 
part, what we are, what we think, and what we do today? Let us imagine that the 
Berlinische Monatschrift still exists and that it is asking its readers the 
question: What is modern philosophy? Perhaps we could respond with an echo: 
modern philosophy is the philosophy that is attempting to answer the question 
raised so imprudently two centuries ago: Was ist Aufklrung?

Let us linger a few moments over Kant's text. It merits attention for several 
reasons.

1. To this same question, Moses Mendelssohn had also replied in the same 
journal, just two months earlier. But Kant had not seen Mendelssohn's text when 
he wrote his. To be sure, the encounter of the German philosophical movement 
with the new development of Jewish culture does not date from this precise 
moment. Mendelssohn had been at that crossroads for thirty years or so, in 
company with Lessing. But up to this point it had been a matter of making a 
place for Jewish culture within German thought -- which Lessing had tried to do 
in Die Juden -- or else of identifying problems common to Jewish thought and to 
German philosophy; this is what Mendelssohn had done in his Phadon; oder, ber 
die Unsterblichkeit der Seele. With the two texts published in the Berlinische 
Monatschrift the German Aufklrung and the Jewish Haskala recognize that they 
belong to the same history; they are seeking to identify the common processes 
from which they stem. And it is perhaps a way of announcing the acceptance of a 
common destiny -- we now know to what drama that was to lead.

2. But there is more. In itself and within the Christian tradition, Kant's text 
poses a new problem.

It was certainly not the first time that philosophical thought had sought to 
reflect on its own present. But, speaking schematically, we may say that this 
reflection had until then taken three main forms.

- The present may be represented as belonging to a certain era of the world, 
distinct from the others through some inherent characteristics, or separated 
from the others by some dramatic event. Thus, in Plato's Statesman the 
interlocutors recognize that they belong to one of those revolutions of the 
world in which the world is turning backwards, with all the negative 
consequences that may ensue.

- The present may be interrogated in an attempt to decipher in it the heralding 
signs of a forthcoming event. Here we have the principle of a kind of historical 
hermeneutics of which Augustine might provide an example.

- The present may also be analyzed as a point of transition toward the dawning 
of a new world. That is what Vico describes in the last chapter of La Scienza 
Nuova; what he sees 'today' is 'a complete humanity ... spread abroad through 
all nations, for a few great monarchs rule over this world of peoples'; it is 
also 'Europe ... radiant with such humanity that it abounds in all the good 
things that make for the happiness of human life.' <1>

Now the way Kant poses the question of Aufklrung is entirely different: it is 
neither a world era to which one belongs, nor an event whose signs are 
perceived, nor the dawning of an accomplishment. Kant defines Aufklrung in an 
almost entirely negative way, as an Ausgang, an 'exit,' a 'way out.' In his 
other texts on history, Kant occasionally raises questions of origin or defines 
the internal teleology of a historical process. In the text on Aufklrung, he 
deals with the question of contemporary reality alone. He is not seeking to 
understand the present on the basis of a totality or of a future achievement. He 
is looking for a difference: What difference does today introduce with respect 
to yesterday?

3. I shall not go into detail here concerning this text, which is not always 
very clear despite its brevity. I should simply like to point out three or four 
features that seem to me important if we are to understand how Kant raised the 
philosophical question of the present day.

Kant indicates right away that the 'way out' that characterizes Enlightenment is 
a process that releases us from the status of 'immaturity.' And by 'immaturity,' 
he means a certain state of our will that makes us accept someone else's 
authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for. Kant gives 
three examples: we are in a state of 'immaturity' when a book takes the place of 
our understanding, when a spiritual director takes the place of our conscience, 
when a doctor decides for us what our diet is to be. (Let us note in passing 
that the register of these three critiques is easy to recognize, even though the 
text does not make it explicit.) In any case, Enlightenment is defined by a 
modification of the preexisting relation linking will, authority, and the use of 
reason.

We must also note that this way out is presented by Kant in a rather ambiguous 
manner. He characterizes it as a phenomenon, an ongoing process; but he also 
presents it as a task and an obligation. From the very first paragraph, he notes 
that man himself is responsible for his immature status. Thus it has to be 
supposed that he will be able to escape from it only by a change that he himself 
will bring about in himself. Significantly, Kant says that this Enlightenment 
has a Wahlspruch: now a Wahlspruch is a heraldic device, that is, a distinctive 
feature by which one can be recognized, and it is also a motto, an instruction 
that one gives oneself and proposes to others. What, then, is this instruction? 
Aude sapere: 'dare to know,' 'have the courage, the audacity, to know.' Thus 
Enlightenment must be considered both as a process in which men participate 
collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished personally. Men are at 
once elements and agents of a single process. They may be actors in the process 
to the extent that they participate in it; and the process occurs to the extent 
that men decide to be its voluntary actors.

A third difficulty appears here in Kant's text in his use of the word 'mankind,' 
Menschheit. The importance of this word in the Kantian conception of history is 
well known. Are we to understand that the entire human race is caught up in the 
process of Enlightenment? In that case, we must imagine Enlightenment as a 
historical change that affects the political and social existence of all people 
on the face of the earth. Or are we to understand that it involves a change 
affecting what constitutes the humanity of human beings? But the question then 
arises of knowing what this change is. Here again, Kant's answer is not without 
a certain ambiguity. In any case, beneath its appearance of simplicity, it is 
rather complex.

Kant defines two essential conditions under which mankind can escape from its 
immaturity. And these two conditions are at once spiritual and institutional, 
ethical and political.

The first of these conditions is that the realm of obedience and the realm of 
the use of reason be clearly distinguished. Briefly characterizing the immature 
status, Kant invokes the familiar expression: 'Don't think, just follow orders'; 
such is, according to him, the form in which military discipline, political 
power, and religious authority are usually exercised. Humanity will reach 
maturity when it is no longer required to obey, but when men are told: 'Obey, 
and you will be able to reason as much as you like.' We must note that the 
German word used here is rsonieren; this word, which is also used in the 
Critiques does not refer to just any use of reason, but to a use of reason in 
which reason has no other end but itself: rsonieren is to reason for 
reasoning's sake. And Kant gives examples, these too being perfectly trivial in 
appearance: paying one's taxes, while being able to argue as much as one likes 
about the system of taxation, would be characteristic of the mature state; or 
again, taking responsibility for parish service, if one is a pastor, while 
reasoning freely about religious dogmas.

We might think that there is nothing very different here from what has been 
meant, since the sixteenth century, by freedom of conscience: the right to think 
as one pleases so long as one obeys as one must. Yet it is here that Kant brings 
into play another distinction, and in a rather surprising way. The distinction 
he introduces is between the private and public uses of reason. But he adds at 
once that reason must be free in its public use, and must be submissive in its 
private use. Which is, term for term, the opposite of what is ordinarily called 
freedom of conscience.

But we must be somewhat more precise. What constitutes, for Kant, this private 
use of reason? In what area is it exercised? Man, Kant says, makes a private use 
of reason when he is 'a cog in a machine'; that is, when he has a role to play 
in society and jobs to do: to be a soldier, to have taxes to pay, to be in 
charge of a parish, to be a civil servant, all this makes the human being a 
particular segment of society; he finds himself thereby placed in a 
circumscribed position, where he has to apply particular rules and pursue 
particular ends. Kant does not ask that people practice a blind and foolish 
obedience, but that they adapt the use they make of their reason to these 
determined circumstances; and reason must then be subjected to the particular 
ends in view. Thus there cannot be, here, any free use of reason.

On the other hand, when one is reasoning only in order to use one's reason, when 
one is reasoning as a reasonable being (and not as a cog in a machine), when one 
is reasoning as a member of reasonable humanity, then the use of reason must be 
free and public. Enlightenment is thus not merely the process by which 
individuals would see their own personal freedom of thought guaranteed. There is 
Enlightenment when the universal, the free, and the public uses of reason are 
superimposed on one another.

Now this leads us to a fourth question that must be put to Kant's text. We can 
readily see how the universal use of reason (apart from any private end) is the 
business of the subject himself as an individual; we can readily see, too, how 
the freedom of this use may be assured in a purely negative manner through the 
absence of any challenge to it; but how is a public use of that reason to be 
assured? Enlightenment, as we see, must not be conceived simply as a general 
process affecting all humanity; it must not be conceived only as an obligation 
prescribed to individuals: it now appears as a political problem. The question, 
in any event, is that of knowing how the use of reason can take the public form 
that it requires, how the audacity to know can be exercised in broad daylight, 
while individuals are obeying as scrupulously as possible. And Kant, in 
conclusion, proposes to Frederick II, in scarcely veiled terms, a sort of 
contract -- what might be called the contract of rational despotism with free 
reason: the public and free use of autonomous reason will be the best guarantee 
of obedience, on condition, however, that the political principle that must be 
obeyed itself be in conformity with universal reason.

Let us leave Kant's text here. I do not by any means propose to consider it as 
capable of constituting an adequate description of Enlightenment; and no 
historian, I think, could be satisfied with it for an analysis of the social, 
political, and cultural transformations that occurred at the end of the 
eighteenth century.

Nevertheless, notwithstanding its circumstantial nature, and without intending 
to give it an exaggerated place in Kant's work, I believe that it is necessary 
to stress the connection that exists between this brief article and the three 
Critiques. Kant in fact describes Enlightenment as the moment when humanity is 
going to put its own reason to use, without subjecting itself to any authority; 
now it is precisely at this moment that the critique is necessary, since its 
role is that of defining the conditions under which the use of reason is 
legitimate in order to determine what can be known, what must be done, and what 
may be hoped. Illegitimate uses of reason are what give rise to dogmatism and 
heteronomy, along with illusion; on the other hand, it is when the legitimate 
use of reason has been clearly defined in its principles that its autonomy can 
be assured. The critique is, in a sense, the handbook of reason that has grown 
up in Enlightenment; and, conversely, the Enlightenment is the age of the 
critique.

It is also necessary, I think, to underline the relation between this text of 
Kant's and the other texts he devoted to history. These latter, for the most 
part, seek to define the internal teleology of time and the point toward which 
history of humanity is moving. Now the analysis of Enlightenment, defining this 
history as humanity's passage to its adult status, situates contemporary reality 
with respect to the overall movement and its basic directions. But at the same 
time, it shows how, at this very moment, each individual is responsible in a 
certain way for that overall process.

The hypothesis I should like to propose is that this little text is located in a 
sense at the crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history. It is 
a reflection by Kant on the contemporary status of his own enterprise. No doubt 
it is not the first time that a philosopher has given his reasons for 
undertaking his work at a particular moment. But it seems to me that it is the 
first time that a philosopher has connected in this way, closely and from the 
inside, the significance of his work with respect to knowledge, a reflection on 
history and a particular analysis of the specific moment at which he is writing 
and because of which he is writing. It is in the reflection on 'today' as 
difference in history and as motive for a particular philosophical task that the 
novelty of this text appears to me to lie.

And, by looking at it in this way, it seems to me we may recognize a point of 
departure: the outline of what one might call the attitude of modernity.

I know that modernity is often spoken of as an epoch, or at least as a set of 
features characteristic of an epoch; situated on a calendar, it would be 
preceded by a more or less naive or archaic premodernity, and followed by an 
enigmatic and troubling 'postmodernity.' And then we find ourselves asking 
whether modernity constitutes the sequel to the Enlightenment and its 
development, or whether we are to see it as a rupture or a deviation with 
respect to the basic principles of the 18th century.

Thinking back on Kant's text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity 
rather as an attitude than as a period of history. And by 'attitude,' I mean a 
mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain 
people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and 
behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and 
presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an 
ethos. And consequently, rather than seeking to distinguish the 'modern era' 
from the 'premodern' or 'postmodern,' I think it would be more useful to try to 
find out how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found 
itself struggling with attitudes of 'countermodernity.'

To characterize briefly this attitude of modernity, I shall take an almost 
indispensable example, namely, Baudelaire; for his consciousness of modernity is 
widely recognized as one of the most acute in the nineteenth century.

1. Modernity is often characterized in terms of consciousness of the 
discontinuity of time: a break with tradition, a feeling of novelty, of vertigo 
in the face of the passing moment. And this is indeed what Baudelaire seems to 
be saying when he defines modernity as 'the ephemeral, the fleeting, the 
contingent.' <2> But, for him, being modern does not lie in recognizing and 
accepting this perpetual movement; on the contrary, it lies in adopting a 
certain attitude with respect to this movement; and this deliberate, difficult 
attitude consists in recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the 
present instant, nor behind it, but within it. Modernity is distinct from 
fashion, which does no more than call into question the course of time; 
modernity is the attitude that makes it possible to grasp the 'heroic' aspect of 
the present moment. Modernity is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting 
present; it is the will to 'heroize' the present .

I shall restrict myself to what Baudelaire says about the painting of his 
contemporaries. Baudelaire makes fun of those painters who, finding nineteenth-
century dress excessively ugly, want to depict nothing but ancient togas. But 
modernity in painting does not consist, for Baudelaire, in introducing black 
clothing onto the canvas. The modern painter is the one who can show the dark 
frock-coat as 'the necessary costume of our time,' the one who knows how to make 
manifest, in the fashion of the day, the essential, permanent, obsessive 
relation that our age entertains with death. 'The dress-coat and frock-coat not 
only possess their political beauty, which is an expression of universal 
equality, but also their poetic beauty, which is an expression of the public 
soul -- an immense cortge of undertaker's mutes (mutes in love, political 
mutes, bourgeois mutes...). We are each of us celebrating some funeral.' <3> To 
designate this attitude of modernity, Baudelaire sometimes employs a litotes 
that is highly significant because it is presented in the form of a precept: 
'You have no right to despise the present.'

2. This heroization is ironical, needless to say. The attitude of modernity does 
not treat the passing moment as sacred in order to try to maintain or perpetuate 
it. It certainly does not involve harvesting it as a fleeting and interesting 
curiosity. That would be what Baudelaire would call the spectator's posture. The 
flneur, the idle, strolling spectator, is satisfied to keep his eyes open, to 
pay attention and to build up a storehouse of memories. In opposition to the 
flneur, Baudelaire describes the man of modernity: 'Away he goes, hurrying, 
searching .... Be very sure that this man ... -- this solitary, gifted with an 
active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert -- has 
an aim loftier than that of a mere flneur, an aim more general, something other 
than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which 
you must allow me to call 'modernity.' ... He makes it his business to extract 
from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history.' As an 
example of modernity, Baudelaire cites the artist Constantin Guys. In appearance 
a spectator, a collector of curiosities, he remains 'the last to linger wherever 
there can be a glow of light, an echo of poetry, a quiver of life or a chord of 
music; wherever a passion can pose before him, wherever natural man and 
conventional man display themselves in a strange beauty, wherever the sun lights 
up the swift joys of the depraved animal.' <4>

But let us make no mistake. Constantin Guys is not a flneur; what makes him the 
modern painter par excellence in Baudelaire's eyes is that, just when the whole 
world is falling asleep, he begins to work, and he transfigures that world. His 
transfiguration does not entail an annulling of reality, but a difficult 
interplay between the truth of what is real and the exercise of freedom; 
'natural' things become 'more than natural,' 'beautiful' things become 'more 
than beautiful,' and individual objects appear 'endowed with an impulsive life 
like the soul of their creator.' <5> For the attitude of modernity, the high 
value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, 
to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but 
by grasping it in what it is. Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which 
extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty 
that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it.

3. However, modernity for Baudelaire is not simply a form of relationship to the 
present; it is also a mode of relationship that has to be established with 
oneself. The deliberate attitude of modernity is tied to an indispensable 
asceticism. To be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the 
passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult 
elaboration: what Baudelaire, in the vocabulary of his day, calls dandysme. Here 
I shall not recall in detail the well-known passages on 'vulgar, earthy, vile 
nature'; on man's indispensable revolt against himself; on the 'doctrine of 
elegance' which imposes 'upon its ambitious and humble disciples' a discipline 
more despotic than the most terrible religions; the pages, finally, on the 
asceticism of the dandy who makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and 
passions, his very existence, a work of art. Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not 
the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he 
is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not 'liberate man in 
his own being'; it compels him to face the task of producing himself.

4. Let me add just one final word. This ironic heroization of the present, this 
transfiguring play of freedom with reality, this ascetic elaboration of the self 
-- Baudelaire does not imagine that these have any place in society itself, or 
in the body politic. They can only be produced in another, a different place, 
which Baudelaire calls art.

I do not pretend to be summarizing in these few lines either the complex 
historical event that was the Enlightenment, at the end of the eighteenth 
century, or the attitude of modernity in the various guises it may have taken on 
during the last two centuries.

I have been seeking, on the one hand, to emphasize the extent to which a type of 
philosophical interrogation -- one that simultaneously problematizes man's 
relation to the present, man's historical mode of being, and the constitution of 
the self as an autonomous subject -- is rooted in the Enlightenment. On the 
other hand, I have been seeking to stress that the thread that may connect us 
with the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the 
permanent reactivation of an attitude -- that is, of a philosophical ethos that 
could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era. I should like 
to characterize this ethos very briefly.

A. Negatively

1. This ethos implies, first, the refusal of what I like to call the 'blackmail' 
of the Enlightenment. I think that the Enlightenment, as a set of political, 
economic, social, institutional, and cultural events on which we still depend in 
large part, constitutes a privileged domain for analysis. I also think that as 
an enterprise for linking the progress of truth and the history of liberty in a 
bond of direct relation, it formulated a philosophical question that remains for 
us to consider. I think, finally, as I have tried to show with reference to 
Kant's text, that it defined a certain manner of philosophizing.

But that does not mean that one has to be 'for' or 'against' the Enlightenment. 
It even means precisely that one has to refuse everything that might present 
itself in the form of a simplistic and authoritarian alternative: you either 
accept the Enlightenment and remain within the tradition of its rationalism 
(this is considered a positive term by some and used by others, on the contrary, 
as a reproach); or else you criticize the Enlightenment and then try to escape 
from its principles of rationality (which may be seen once again as good or 
bad). And w e do not break free of this blackmail by introducing 'dialectical' 
nuances while seeking to determine what good and bad elements there may have 
been in the Enlightenment.

We must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are 
historically determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment. Such an 
analysis implies a series of historical inquiries that are as precise as 
possible; and these inquiries will not be oriented retrospectively toward the 
'essential kernel of rationality' that can be found in the Enlightenment and 
that would have to be preserved in any event; they will be oriented toward the 
'contemporary limits of the necessary,' that is, toward what is not or is no 
longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects.

2. This permanent critique of ourselves has to avoid the always too facile 
confusions between humanism and Enlightenment.

We must never forget that the Enlightenment is an event, or a set of events and 
complex historical processes, that is located at a certain point in the 
development of European societies. As such, it includes elements of social 
transformation, types of political institution, forms of knowledge, projects of 
rationalization of knowledge and practices, technological mutations that are 
very difficult to sum up in a word, even if many of these phenomena remain 
important today. The one I have pointed out and that seems to me to have been at 
the basis of an entire form of philosophical reflection concerns only the mode 
of reflective relation to the present.

Humanism is something entirely different. It is a theme or rather a set of 
themes that have reappeared on several occasions over time in European 
societies; these themes always tied to value judgments have obviously varied 
greatly in their content as well as in the values they have preserved. 
Furthermore they have served as a critical principle of differentiation. In the 
seventeenth century there was a humanism that presented itself as a critique of 
Christianity or of religion in general; there was a Christian humanism opposed 
to an ascetic and much more theocentric humanism. In the nineteenth century 
there was a suspicious humanism hostile and critical toward science and another 
that to the contrary placed its hope in that same science. Marxism has been a 
humanism; so have existentialism and personalism; there was a time when people 
supported the humanistic values represented by National Socialism and when the 
Stalinists themselves said they were humanists.

From this we must not conclude that everything that has ever been linked with 
humanism is to be rejected but that the humanistic thematic is in itself too 
supple too diverse too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection. And it 
is a fact that at least since the seventeenth century what is called humanism 
has always been obliged to lean on certain conceptions of man borrowed from 
religion science or politics. Humanism serves to color and to justify the 
conceptions of man to which it is after all obliged to take recourse.

Now in this connection I believe that this thematic which so often recurs and 
which always depends on humanism can be opposed by the principle of a critique 
and a permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy: that is a principle that 
is at the heart of the historical consciousness that the Enlightenment has of 
itself. From this standpoint I am inclined to see Enlightenment and humanism in 
a state of tension rather than identity.

In any case it seems to me dangerous to confuse them; and further it seems 
historically inaccurate. If the question of man of the human species of the 
humanist was important throughout the eighteenth century this is very rarely I 
believe because the Enlightenment considered itself a humanism. It is worthwhile 
too to note that throughout the nineteenth century the historiography of 
sixteenth-century humanism which was so important for people like Saint-Beuve or 
Burckhardt was always distinct from and sometimes explicitly opposed to the 
Enlightenment and the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century had a tendency 
to oppose the two at least as much as to confuse them.

In any case I think that just as we must free ourselves from the intellectual 
blackmail of being for or against the Enlightenment we must escape from the 
historical and moral confusionism that mixes the theme of humanism with the 
question of the Enlightenment. An analysis of their complex relations in the 
course of the last two centuries would be a worthwhile project an important one 
if we are to bring some measure of clarity to the consciousness that we have of 
ourselves and of our past.

B. Positively

Yet while taking these precautions into account we must obviously give a more 
positive content to what may be a philosophical ethos consisting in a critique 
of what we are saying thinking and doing through a historical ontology of 
ourselves.

1. This philosophical ethos may be characterized as a limit-attitude. We are not 
talking about a gesture of rejection. We have to move beyond the outside-inside 
alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism indeed consists of 
analyzing and reflecting upon limits. But if the Kantian question was that of 
knowing what limits knowledge has to renounce transgressing, it seems to me that 
the critical question today has to be turned back into a positive one: in what 
is given lo us as universal necessary obligatory what place is occupied by 
whatever is singular contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints? The 
point in brief is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary 
limitation into a practical critique that lakes the form of a possible 
transgression.

This entails an obvious consequence: that criticism is no longer going to be 
practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather 
as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute 
ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, 
saying. In that sense, this criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not 
that of making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design and 
archaeological in its method. Archaeological -- and not transcendental -- in the 
sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all 
knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances 
of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical 
events. And this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not 
deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to 
know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we 
are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or 
think. It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become 
a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to 
the undefined work of freedom.

2. But if we are not to settle for the affirmation or the empty dream of 
freedom, it seems to me that this historico-critical attitude must also be an 
experimental one. I mean that this work done at the limits of ourselves must, on 
the one hand, open up a realm of historical inquiry and, on the other, put 
itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points 
where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this 
change should take. This means that the historical ontology of ourselves must 
turn away from all projects that claim to be global or radical. In fact we know 
from experience that the claim to escape from the system of contemporary reality 
so as to produce the overall programs of another society, of another way of 
thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has led only to the 
return of the most dangerous traditions.

I prefer the very specific transformations that have proved to be possible in 
the last twenty years in a certain number of areas that concern our ways of 
being and thinking, relations to authority, relations between the sexes, the way 
in which we perceive insanity or illness; I prefer even these partial 
transformations that have been made in the correlation of historical analysis 
and the practical attitude, to the programs for a new man that the worst 
political systems have repeated throughout the twentieth century.

I shall thus characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical 
ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go 
beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings.

3. Still, the following objection would no doubt be entirely legitimate: if we 
limit ourselves to this type of always partial and local inquiry or test, do we 
not run the risk of letting ourselves be determined by more general structures 
of which we may well not be conscious, and over which we may have no control?

To this, two responses. It is true that we have to give up hope of ever acceding 
to a point of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive 
knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits. And from this point of 
view the theoretical and practical experience that we have of our limits and of 
the possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we 
are always in the position of beginning again .

But that does not mean that no work can be done except in disorder and 
contingency. The work in question has its generality, its systematicity, its 
homogeneity, and its stakes.

(a) Its Stakes

These are indicated by what might be called 'the paradox of the relations of 
capacity and power.' We know that the great promise or the great hope of the 
eighteenth century, or a part of the eighteenth century, lay in the simultaneous 
and proportional growth of individuals with respect to one another. And, 
moreover, we can see that throughout the entire history of Western societies (it 
is perhaps here that the root of their singular historical destiny is located --
such a peculiar destiny, so different from the others in its trajectory and so 
universalizing, so dominant with respect to the others), the acquisition of 
capabilities and the struggle for freedom have constituted permanent elements. 
Now the relations between the growth of capabilities and the growth of autonomy 
are not as simple as the eighteenth century may have believed. And we have been 
able to see what forms of power relation were conveyed by various technologies 
(whether we are speaking of productions with economic aims, or institutions 
whose goal is social regulation, or of techniques of communication): 
disciplines, both collective and individual, procedures of normalization 
exercised in the name of the power of the state, demands of society or of 
population zones, are examples. What is at stake, then, is this: How can the 
growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power 
relations?

(b) Homogeneity

This leads to the study of what could be called 'practical systems.' Here we are 
taking as a homogeneous domain of reference not the representations that men 
give of themselves, not the conditions that determine them without their 
knowledge, but rather what they do and the way they do it. That is, the forms of 
rationality that organize their ways of doing things (this might be called the 
technological aspect) and the freedom with which they act within these practical 
systems, reacting to what others do, modifying the rules of the game, up to a 
certain point (this might be called the strategic side of these practices). The 
homogeneity of these historico-critical analyses is thus ensured by this realm 
of practices, with their technological side and their strategic side.

(c) Systematicity

These practical systems stem from three broad areas: relations of control over 
things, relations of action upon others, relations with oneself. This does not 
mean that each of these three areas is completely foreign to the others. It is 
well known that control over things is mediated by relations with others; and 
relations with others in turn always entail relations with oneself, and vice 
versa. But we have three axes whose specificity and whose interconnections have 
to be analyzed: the axis of knowledge, the axis of power, the axis of ethics. In 
other terms, the historical ontology of ourselves has to answer an open series 
of questions; it has to make an indefinite number of inquiries which may be 
multiplied and specified as much as we like, but which will all address the 
questions systematized as follows: How are we constituted as subjects of our own 
knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power 
relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions?

(d) Generality

Finally, these historico-critical investigations are quite specific in the sense 
that they always bear upon a material, an epoch, a body of determined practices 
and discourses. And yet, at least at the level of the Western societies from 
which we derive, they have their generality, in the sense that they have 
continued to recur up to our time: for example, the problem of the relationship 
between sanity and insanity, or sickness and health, or crime and the law; the 
problem of the role of sexual relations; and so on.

But by evoking this generality, I do not mean to suggest that it has to be 
retraced in its metahistorical continuity over time, nor that its variations 
have to be pursued. What must be grasped is the extent to which what we know of 
it, the forms of power that are exercised in it, and the experience that we have 
in it of ourselves constitute nothing but determined historical figures, through 
a certain form of problematization that defines objects, rules of action, modes 
of relation to oneself. The study of modes of problematization (that is, of what 
is neither an anthropological constant nor a chronological variation) is thus 
the way to analyze questions of general import in their historically unique 
form.

A brief summary, to conclude and to come back to Kant.

I do not know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood. Many things in our 
experience convince us that the historical event of the Enlightenment did not 
make us mature adults, and we have not reached that stage yet. However, it seems 
to me that a meaning can be attributed to that critical interrogation on the 
present and on ourselves which Kant formulated by reflecting on the 
Enlightenment. It seems to me that Kant's reflection is even a way of 
philosophizing that has not been without its importance or effectiveness during 
the last two centuries. The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered 
not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of 
knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, 
a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same 
time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an 
experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.

This philosophical attitude has to be translated into the labor of diverse 
inquiries. These inquiries have their methodological coherence in the at once 
archaeological and genealogical study of practices envisaged simultaneously as a 
technological type of rationality and as strategic games of liberties; they have 
their theoretical coherence in the definition of the historically unique forms 
in which the generalities of our relations to things, to others, to ourselves, 
have been problematized. They have their practical coherence in the care brought 
to the process of putting historico-critical reflection to the test of concrete 
practices. I do not know whether it must be said today that the critical task 
still entails faith in Enlightenment; I continue to think that this task 
requires work on our limits, that is, a patient labor giving form to our 
impatience for liberty.

Notes:

<1> Giambattista Vico, The New Science, 3rd ed., (1744), abridged trans. T. G. 
Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 370, 
372.

<2> Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, trans. Jonathan Mayne 
(London: Phaidon, 1964), p. 13.

<3> Charles Baudelaire, 'On the Heroism of Modern Life,' in The Mirror of Art, 
trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1955), p. 127.

<4> Baudelaire, Painter, pp. 12, Il.

<5> Ibid., p. 12.