Autonomy, Aesthetics, Authority: Concepts and Aporias of Enlightenment in Immanuel Kant and Michel Foucault

Abstract

The article delineates Immanuel Kant’s concept of Enlightenment as developed in his essay, “Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” and its critical reception from the late Michel Foucault. The first part focuses on Kant’s understanding of Enlightenment as a process. It unearths a latent tension between the two main elements of this process: the universal, i.e. superhistorical, rational faculties of all rational beings, and the particular, i.e. historical conditions for the development of these faculties. These conditions are summarized in the emergence of public sphere in 18th century Prussia and/or in the so-called ‘Western World’. The tension arises from Kant’s effort to connect in a quasi-necessary way the superhistorical element and the historical element of the Enlightenment process. The second part of the article exhibits the reasons, why Kant’s article assumes such a prominent role in the writings of the late Michel Foucault. It depicts the way that Foucault makes use of the aforementioned tension in Kant’s essay in order to replace the canonical Kantian concept of critique with Kant’s concept of Enlightenment as critique. The third and final part of the article offers a diagnosis of the contemporary sociopolitical state-of-affairs. It argues that Kant’s concept of Enlightenment as such and Foucault’s modification thereof summarize the reasons that lead to the contemporary crisis of authority vis-à-vis politics, religion and state institutions. From this diagnosis arises the need for a new conceptualization of the relation between modern individual freedom and authority. Elements of this new relation, the article concludes, can be found in the work of the mid 20th-century, unjustly underappreciated German philosopher Gerhard Krüger.