Notes

Michel Foucault. What is
Enlightenment?
What is Enlightenment? in Rabinow (P.), éd., The Foucault Reader, New York,
Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 32-50.

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 Aufklärung ?
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
Aufklärung 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 Aufklärung ?

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, Ãœber die Unsterblichkeit der Seele. With the two texts
published in the Berlinische Monatschrift the German Aufklärung 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.
o 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.
o 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]
o

Now the way Kant poses the question of Aufklärung 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 Aufklärung 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 Aufklärung, 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 räsonieren; 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: räsonieren 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 cortège 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 flâneur,
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 flâneur,
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 flâneur, 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 flâneur; 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.