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Heidegger and Foucault on the Subject, Agency and Practices
Hubert L. Dreyfus Introduction Whatever their similarities and differences, one thing that
Heidegger and Foucault clearly have in common is that both are critical
of the Cartesian idea of a self-transparent subject and the related Kantian
ideal of autonomous agency. Yet neither denies the importance of human
freedom. In Heidegger's early work the subject is reinterpreted as Dasein
-- a non autonomous, culturally bound (or thrown) way of being, that can
yet change the field of possibilities in which it acts. In middle Heidegger,
thinkers alone have the power to disclose a new world, while in later
Heidegger, anyone is free to step back from the current world, to enter
one of a plurality of worlds, and, thereby, facilitate a change in the
practices of one's society. Likewise, for early Foucault, the subject
is reduced to a function of discourse; for middle Foucault, writing can
open up new worlds, and in later Foucault, freedom is understood as the
power to question what is currently taken for granted, plus the capacity
to change oneself and, perhaps, one's milieu. In short, while both Heidegger
and Foucault reject the Enlightenment idea of an autonomous subject, they
have a robust notion of freedom and action. And it will turn out for both
thinkers that each person can modify his or her cultural practices by
openness to embeddedness in them. All this needs a great deal of explanation.
We need to determine, on the one hand, just what each rejects and why,
and, on the other, what series of understandings of the self and its possibilities
for action each introduces. I. Early Heidegger's Substitution of Dasein for the Cartesian
Subject Heidegger's determination to break out of the philosophical
tradition is focused in his attempt to get beyond the subject/object distinction.
Heidegger opposes the Husserlian claim that a person's relation to the
world and the things in it must be mediated by something in the person's
mind: beliefs, desires, experiences, etc. -- what philosophers call "intentional
content." As he puts it:
He seeks to undermine this view by returning to the phenomenon
of everyday skillful activity. He finds that, when everyday coping is
going well, one experiences something like what athletes call flow, or
playing out of their heads. One does not distinguish one's experience
of acting from one's ongoing activity, and therefore one has no experience
of oneself as a subject causing that activity. Phenomenological examination shows that, in a wide variety
of situations, human beings are related to the world in an organized purposive
manner yet without the constant accompaniment of a subjective state
which specifies what the action is aimed at accomplishing. Indeed, at
times one is actually surprised when one's action is accomplished, as
when one's thoughts are interrupted by one's arrival at the office. A
huge amount of our lives -- working, walking, talking, eating, driving,
etc. -- is spent in this non-mediated coping mode and only a small part
is spent in the deliberate, purposeful, subject/object mode. Yet the reflective
is, of course, the mode we tend to notice, and so it has formed our common-sense
concept of action and has been studied in detail by philosophers. To consolidate his rejection of the primacy of the self-sufficient
subject, Heidegger rejects the Cartesian terminology which expresses it.
So far we have seen that in non-deliberate activities we
experience ourselves only as an open responsiveness to what solicits our
activity. Heidegger now adds that such unthinking activity provides the
background both for specific acts of ongoing coping and for deliberately
focusing on what is unusual or difficult. The basic idea is that for a
particular person to be directed toward a particular piece of equipment,
whether using it, perceiving it, or whatever, there must be a correlation
between that person's general capacity for skillful coping and the interconnected
equipmental whole in which the piece of equipment has a place. For example,
when I enter a room I normally cope with the tables, chairs, etc. What
enables me to do this is not a set of beliefs about rooms, it is a socialized
set of skills for dealing with such equipmental wholes that I have developed
by crawling and walking around many rooms. In Being and Time, Heidegger describes this general
coping as familiarity. And just as in ordinary cases of coping, where
Dasein is absorbed in its activity with no experiences of itself as an
action-directing subject, so when Dasein is simply at home in its situation,
there is no separation between Dasein's disclosing comportment and the
world disclosed: "Self and world are not two entities, like subject and
object . . . but self and world are the basic determination of Dasein
itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world". It is important to realize that our general background coping,
our familiarity with the world, is what Being and Time is all about.
Indeed, Heidegger says explicitly that "this familiarity with the world
. . . goes to make up Dasein's understanding of being." This understanding
of being provides a background understanding of what matters and of what
it makes sense to do.. Moreover, this background coping gives us a space
or a clearing in which things and people can show up as mattering
and meaningful for us.
Dasein does not produce the clearing by some act of
choice. Rather the background coping gives Dasein its sense of what sort
of being it is. And since individual Daseins can act only within this
background that determines what can show up as making sense to do, Dasein
can never be the fully lucid source of its actions postulated by the modern
understanding of the subject and of autonomous agency. II. Early Foucault on the Disappearance of the Subject
Foucault makes a similar discovery. After Madness and
Civilization through the period of The Order of Things and
The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault came under the influence
of French Structuralism. He was never, strictly speaking, a structuralist
since the structures he studied were historical and changed abruptly from
epoch to epoch, but he did share with structuralism a determined effort
to eliminate the Cartesian subject. He did not deny, any more than did
Heidegger, that human beings were conscious and did things. But, like
Heidegger, he argued that the subject as a lucid, autonomous agent, was
a product of particular practices and so could not have the causal agency
our culture attributed to it. For Foucault, in this period, the subject is a function
of discourse. Statements have to be attributed to some speaker, but what
is essential about any statement, Foucault argues, is its role in a system
of other statements. This role is independent of the psychological fact
that the statement was uttered or written by someone. Foucault concludes
that "the different forms of speaking subjectivity [are] effects proper
to the enunciative field." In The Order of Things, Foucault undermines our tendency
to think that each of us is a self-sufficient, meaning-giving cogito by
recounting the history of the construction of the Cartesian subject and
the Kantian agent. On Foucault's account both turn out be the product
of a "warped" and "twisted" form of reflection he calls the transcendental/empirical
double. Foucault notes that when man sees himself as involved in the world
and also as a transcendental source of meaning, he enters into a strange
relation with his own involvements. His use of language that he does not
master, his inherence in a living organism he does not fully penetrate
with thought, and the desires that he cannot control must all be taken
to be the basis of his ability to think and act. But if man is to be a
lucid transcendental source of meaning, this unthought must be ultimately
accessible to thought. And if he is to be autonomous, this unthought must
be dominated in action. Yet insofar as this unthought in its obscurity
is precisely the condition of the possibility of thought and action it
can never be fully absorbed into the cogito. Thus the lucid subject is
not only undermined by the realization that it is a construction of our
modern discursive formation and so has no causal power; the Kantian autonomous
agent is an internally contradictory ideal. Such considerations support Foucault's famous claim that
"man," Foucault's name for the autonomous subject, is a recent invention
and will soon pass away. Foucault sums up his view in this period in an
interview from May 1969.
III. Early Heidegger's Replacement of Kantian Autonomy
by Authentic Resoluteness Foucault is happy simply to look forward to the disappearance
of the subject; Heidegger, however, wants to find out what can take its
place. If Dasein is "thrown" into cultural practices what becomes
of human freedom? This is the question Heidegger faces in Division II
of Being and Time. To begin with, one must accept that there is a structural
limit to Dasein's autonomy. Heidegger calls this structural feature existential
guilt. Existential guilt does not denote Dasein's moral lapses or its
failure to choose for itself; it reveals an essentially unsatisfactory
structure definitive of even authentic Dasein. Even if Dasein has done
nothing wrong there is something wrong with Dasein -- it can’t be
transparent to itself. For example, a particular Dasein does not choose
to be brought up as masculine or feminine. Yet what is more important
is that each of these roles is so pervasive, so much a part of any skillful
comportment and the way various skillful comportments mesh together, that
one can never get clear about all any such role implies. One will never
be able to accept or reject it in toto. As Heidegger puts
it, "Dasein cannot get behind its throwness" (p. 330) [p. 284]. Dasein
must act on the basis of taken-for-granted practices that it can never
fully grasp. III. Authentic Resoluteness as a New Source of Freedom
Given its existential guilt Dasein has to give up the goal
of Kantian autonomy, but in so doing it gains a new sort of freedom and
responsibility. To be authentic, i.e. to own up to its own structure,
Dasein must be what Heidegger calls resolute. Dasein must take
responsibility for the understanding of being that it embodies but cannot
know. For example, men and women must take responsibility for gender roles
so pervasive and so much a part of bodily dispositions that they can never
be spelled out as a belief system. But precisely in accepting this limit
on its lucidity and autonomy, and thereby opening itself to the clearing
in which it acts, authentic Dasein gains the possibility of a new, more
powerful, freedom. At this early stage Heidegger holds that Dasein expriences
its thrownness and groundlessness in anxiety. If it resolutely holds onto
anxiety, that is, if it accepts its ontological limitations, it will give
up rigid roles and identities and become sensitive to marginal practices
from the past. So, for instance, resolute women will be able to be sensitive
to gender practices left in our culture from pioneer days. As Heidegger
puts it:
Marginal possibilities offer the individual non-banal ways
of perceiving and responding to the current situation. Heidegger's idea
seems to be that, by taking up such marginal practices from the past in
its current coping, Dasein can innovate in an otherwise banal and closed
world. Thus an individual can contribute to changing the shared world,
i.e. the understanding of the issues and what to do about them, for his
or her generation. Freedom to change itself by modifying its background practices
is the way Dasein can live a life worth living, even though it can never
be a self-sufficient, lucid, autonomous subject. But can Dasein, by abandoning
the illusion of subjectivity and autonomy, contribute to changing the
structure of the background practices as a whole? V. The Thinker's Role in the Establishment of Truth For everyday practices to give meaning to people's lives
and unite them in a community something must collect the scattered practices
of the group, unify them into coherent possibilities for action, and hold
them up to the people. The people can then act and relate themselves to
each other in terms of this exemplar. And the object that performs this
function best Heidegger calls a work of art. As his illustration of an
art work working, Heidegger takes the Greek temple. The temple held up
to the Greeks what was important and so established the meaningful differences
such a victory and disgrace in respect to which they could orient their
actions. The style of the background practices as a whole change
radically each time a culture gets a new art work. After such a change
different sorts of human beings and things show up. For the Greeks, what
showed up were heroes and slaves and marvelous things; for the Christians,
saints and sinners, rewards and temptations. There could not have been
saints in Ancient Greece. At best there could have been weak people who
let everybody walk all over them. Likewise, there could not have been
Greek-style heroes in the Middle Ages. Such people would have been regarded
as prideful sinners. Generalizing the idea of a work of art, Heidegger holds
that "there must always be some being in the open [the clearing], something
that is, in which the openness takes its stand and attains its constancy"
(PLT 61, G 5 48). Let us call such special things cultural paradigms.
A cultural paradigm is any being in the clearing that disclose a new world
or, by refocusing the current cultural practices can disclose the world
anew. Heidegger mentions five types of cultural paradigms--works of art,
acts of statements, nearness of a god, and sacrifice of a god, and the
words of a thinker-- but, for brevity's sake, we shall concern ourselves
only with two, the founding political act and the thinker's words. The
U.S. Constitution would count as a cultural paradigm for Heidegger. For
it is just the sort of political act that establishes an understanding
of what it is to be a state by articulating an understanding already in
that culture. Once established, because it is so important to the people
whose world it organizes, it becomes the center of a struggle to make
it clear, coherent and complete. Heidegger calls this tendency in the
practices to move towards clarity the world aspect. But any being resists
being completely clarified. Heidegger calls this resitance the world aspect.
The struggle between them sets up what he calls an outline which is the
specific style of the culture. The struggle between various interpretations
of the paradigm makes the culture historical since the present repeatedly
reinterprets the past and sets up a new future. The second cultural paradigm consists in the words of the
thinker. The thinker, by being receptive to the current practices (both
central and marginal), is able to reconfigure the practices and so bring
about a new shared style or understanding of being or can articulate the
understanding already in the practices in a diffuse way and so focus a
world. Thinkers, in the course of Western history, have named being as
physis, poesis, res, creation, and subjectivity/objectivity
and standing reserve and have thus contributed to establishing a succession
of historical worlds.
Founding such a new beginning, then, requires not genius,
but openness and receptivity to the marginal practices:
The new beginning is a founding leap -- an Ur-sprung
-- which by way of its grounding in the marginal practices from the past
bestows a new clearing.
Thanks to his total embeddedness in the current style of
his culture and by virtue of his receptivity, the thinker has the most
radical freedom possible for a human being. Heidegger calls this freedom,
freedom to ground. Before we return to the way all human beings can, in
effect, be mini-thinkers and change their local worlds, we need to follow
a development, parallel to the one we have been following in Heidegger,
in the writings of Foucault. V. The Author's Role in Establishing Discursive Domains We have seen that when Heidegger eliminated the subject
he at the same time introduced the authentic individual. This step has
no parallel in the thinking of early Foucault -- an omission he later
came to regret. Rather than proposing a unified, relatively stable, resolute
Dasein, Foucault was happy to find that the subject was replaced by a
dispersed, unstable function. In the same interview on the death of the
subject already quoted, Foucault continues:
But just as Heidegger did not long confine himself to the
narrow agency of resolute Dasein, so Foucault does not long retain his
view of the wholly dispersed agent. Rather, in his essay, "What Is an
Author?," Foucault develops the notion of a discourse founder who, like
Heidegger's thinker, open up a domain--in this case a domain of discourse. This essay is usually read as a continuation of Foucault's
attack on the subject, and, indeed, in it Foucault like Heidegger rejects
the idea of the author as a genius -- a psychological subject whose private
meanings and public expressions are crucial to understanding his work
and its effects. Rather,
The hermeneutic approach to the author as a subject with
deep and original meanings has to be rejected since the author is only
a social construction. Again, Foucault says of the author.
Foucault thus seeks to "call back into question the absolute
character and founding role of the subject."
But something more powerful than an author emerges from
Foucault's analysis. What Foucault discovers is a kind of writer who is
able to establish a local clearing which one might call a disclosive space.
Foucault calls such figures founders of discursivity. The open a new style
of discourse.
A founder of discursivity in opening a disclosive space
sets up a struggle of interpretations which starts a new line of history.
In contrast to a scientific founder like Galileo, whose work is made obsolete
by the new science he opens up, founders of discursivity never loose their
importance for their interpreters.
How do the current interpreters relate to the founders?
Not, Foucault insists, by looking for the deep truth hidden in their texts.
That would be commentary, and he rejects commentary as endless and fruitless:
Here Foucault seems to be criticizing Heidegger by criticizing
Hans-Georg Gadamer's view of interpretation, but this may only show that
Gadamer never understood Heidegger. For Heidegger the cultural paradigm is an inexhaustible
object of interpretation, not because the thinker was a genius or the
text too full of meanings, but rather because there is a necessary absence
in the cultural paradigm. One might think that just because the thinker
manifests the current understanding of being, he names what is so pervasive
and embodied it cannot be made fully explicit, but even this is a too
Hegelian and Gadamarian way to put it. Since what the thinker manifests
is the organization of the practices that constitute the background of
all intelligibility, what he or she explicitly says in the text cannot
be what is important. The understanding of being would pervade the work
without being themartized. What is important is the way the thinker's
words are attuned to the background. Heidegger's clearest formulation
of this difficult claim is in his essay "Reflection in Metaphysics," (1941):
This attunement to being is not attunement to a positive
but hidden truth. Rather the attunement manifests a necessary structural
absence.
Heidegger adds:
There is, then, no hidden truth to explicate; the understanding
of being is all on the surface in all the practices, and all over the
text as its own background of intelligibility. The thinker in his receptivity
experiences what is going on in the practices and is able in his work
to focus what is going on, but unlike a lucid agent, a thinker is never
able to explicitlyu articulate explicitly what he is experiencing. Yet
precisely because his work is changing the understanding of being, the
thinker is more perceptive than the most lucid subject and more effective
than the most persistent agent. Likewise, the interpreter or preserver
who returns to such founding thinkers can, by taking up practices from
the heritage in a new way, contribute to changing the present practices.
Foucault in "What is an Author?" holds a view close to Heidegger's
when he rejects commentary and introduces what he takes to be the right
kind of return to the text of a founder of a domain of discursivity.
Foucault also sees the effect such an interpretation can
produce:
Yet, Foucault seems to agree with Nietzsche and argue against
Heidegger when he says, in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," that genealogy
absolutely "opposes itself to the search for 'origins'" (p. 77). How can
we understand how Foucault can reject any return to origins as he does
in his discussion of Nietzsche and yet advocate a return to origins in
the cases of the founders of discursivity? The answer is that what Nietzsche
rejects as origins is the same rich truth that Foucault rejects when he
rejects commentary, while what Nietzsche proposes is a return to the point
of emergence, which Foucault defines as "the entry of forces .
. . the leap from the wings to the center stage." This corresponds almost
exactly to Heidegger's account of the origin of the work of art as the
Ur-sprung, the originating leap-- a leap a thinker's thought brings
about when, in that thinker’s saying, marginal practices become central
and central practices marginal so that the understanding of being is re-gestalted.
Foucault's account sounds like a more violent version of Heidegger's when
he says:
These similarities between the thought of Heidegger and
Foucault should not surprise us since it is really the Hegelian and Gadamarian
metaphysical notion of the continuing, unfolding, of some positive cultural
and personal identity that Foucault is opposing here -- a metaphysical
construct first defined and opposed by Heidegger. The notion of the origin as a originating leap, with
its account of the emergence of incommensurate worlds, is meant precisely
to reject this Hegelian teleological view of the implicit truth gradually
becoming explicit. For Foucault's Nietzsche too:
There is nonetheless, at this stage, a real difference between
Foucault and Heidegger. Just as for Heidegger the nullified self can unify
its life in resoluteness, the culture unifies itself each time there is
a new beginning. Heidegger thinks that struggle is always stabilized in
a world with an overall style, which for a time "gathers together all
the paths of destiny." On Foucault's reading of himself and Nietzsche,
there is no such tendency to stability.
The main difference between Heidegger and Foucault, then,
is that Foucault sees Nietzsche as affirming a continual instability in
the practices defining both the self and the culture, while Heidegger
points to the importance of a non-metaphysical but nonetheless essential
tendency towards gathering in the practices which he calls appropriation
(Ereignis). As we shall see Foucault is pulled both toward a Heideggerian
account of gathering and also towards Nietzschean dispersion. But once
we see, in passages like the above, that Foucault is arguing primarily
against Hegel and not Heidegger, we will be prepared to understand how
the Heideggerian picture of the way marginal practices coalesce to form
stable unities comes more and more to dominate Foucault's account of the
history of the West. Indeed, if we set aside the question of how stable
cultural practices naturally are -- a question on which, if it makes any
sense, Foucault and Heidegger deeply differ -- and ask how stable the
practices of an epoch can in fact become,
we will find Foucault's view approaching Heidegger's as the two thinkers
focus their analysis on the understanding of being characteristic of modernity VII. Heidegger and Foucault on the Modern Subject [ In his account of modernity, Heidegger begins by
telling us that "Metaphysics grounds an age, in that, through a specific
interpretation of what is, and through a specific comprehension of truth
it gives to that age the basis upon which it is essentially formed." Foucault
says more narrowly: "In any given culture and at any given moment, there
is only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all
knowledge whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice."
Both view the emergence of representation in the Classical Age as the
beginning of modernity that finally becomes explicit in Kant's interpretation
of man. Heidegger tells us of a radical transformation in our understanding
of being which took place in the 17th century: "What is decisive is that
man himself expressly takes up this position as one constituted by himself
and that he makes it secure as the footing for a possible development
of humanity." This understanding of man is an understanding of the subject,
not just as lucid and autonomous, but as the substitute for God, as the
self-certain source of all meaning. The essence of subjectivity after
Kant is to be the ground of all intelligibility. It follows for Heidegger
that
anthropological definition of technology." Modern technology,
Heidegger tells us, is "something completely different and therefore new."
It is a new ordering of background practices. In "The Age of the World Picture," Heidegger interprets
this new technological understanding of beings -- let us call it technicity
-- by looking at one of its greatest achievements, scientific research.
The direction of technological practices, Heidegger tells us, is toward
total order for its own sake.
In other words, technicity tends towards the treatment of
everything as resources to be ever more efficiently and flexibly ordered.
Heidegger seems to waver on the question whether, as
technicity reaches its final stage, it will accentuate subjects and objects
or eliminate them. In the end, however, he seems clearly to hold that
technicity can most efficiently treat both people and things as resources
when it ceases setting meaning-giving subjects over against objectified
things. He observes that soon there will be no objects and no subjects,
just "a system of information." and human beings will loose all freedom
as they are "sucked up as standing reserve." For Foucault, as for Heidegger, modern practices produce
a new subject that is the source of truth, but not the truth about the
whole world as in Kantian world picturing. Rather the Foucaultian modern
subject is constituted as the source of a deep inner truth about itself.
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault tells a rather
unNietzschean continuous story of how the gradual development of confessional
practices in the West produced a very stable, unified subject -- a subject
Foucault calls the man of desires. Such a subject is not only something
self-sufficient standing over against objects as in Descartes, or the
source of all meaning as in Kant; rather it is the locus of private desires
and intentions over against public actions. Foucault claims in The Care of the Self that the
Christians took over for their own purposes an elaborate technology of
self-examination that was already in place by the time of the Stoics.
The Stoics separated deeds from their motivating desire and used techniques
of self-care to control dangerous desires. But the Christian subject identifies
itself not with its public deeds but with his most private intentions,
desires, fantasies, and dreams. Moreover, since what one really desires
might well be forbidden and therefore disguised in some other desire,
this Christian subject has constantly to examine its desires to dredge
up its true motivations. Foucault quotes an early confessional
manual: "Examine . . . all your thoughts, every word you speak, and all
your actions. Examine even unto your dreams, to know if, once awakened,
you did not give them your consent. And finally, do not think that in
so sensitive and perilous a matter as this, there is anything trivial
or insignificant." This is the motto, he claims, of the suspicious, confessing,
subjects we have all become. When these confessional practices linked up with totalizing
scientific practices in the early seventeenth century, they produced a
new concern for the subject as a sexual being, and finally two centuries
later, a science of sexuality that was supposed to hold the clue to human
agency. Freud supplies the last stage in this constitution of the hermeneutic
sexual subject. He sees the self as a subject that needs to recover the
repressed truth of its desires -- the secret of its sexuality. He claims
to have developed a science of the subject, understanding
sexual desire as a natural kind about which we can discover laws of normal
development, functioning and causal effects. Foucault holds that this claim is unfounded.
There is no such natural kind, Foucault claims. Like the
Kantian autonomous subject, the Freudian sexual subject is an artificial
construction of, what Foucault calls, Power. Consequently, Foucault says
that for us,
So power is not exercised by modern subjects; it creates
them. Thus the search for meaning is not liberating but enslaving. Just
as sex is the illusory source of causation; the successfully analyzed
subject is the illusory center of freedom.] VI. How Can We Free Ourselves From Modern Subjectivity? Both Heidegger and Foucault maintain that the current why
the practices work is to coopt all deviation. Marginal practices are either
trivialized or transformed so as to be efficient and enhance life. [Examples
of playing with children, and back packing into the wilderness.] Heidegger
has a modest proposal as to how, despite the tendency of current practices
to coopt all deviation, we can modify, in small ways, the current understanding
of being. Human begins should become preservers, that is they should
cherish things which gather and focus local practices whether such things
be old stone bridges or the latest autobahn overpass:
Practices that produce such focal things as a celebratory
meal or playing music together resist the push towards dispersion which
is the flip side of technicity's tendency toward totalization. Furthermore, for Heidegger our ability to open ourselves
to the gathering of even technological things like the autobahn bridge
is a way of getting in sync with the style of our technological practices.
This getting in sync reveals our technological practices as a clearing
or mode of revealing, not as the way things have to be, and so frees us
from the compulsion to challenge all things into total ordering. At the
same time it frees us to have a plurality of different local situations
of relative stability and order. These various local worlds would be in
a loose sort of agreement in multiplicity while resisting total coordination
and mobilization. Such a loosely collected plurality of worlds would resemble
the polytheistic practices Heidegger admires in the Homeric Greeks. For late Heidegger, then, the resolute Dasein of Being
and Time who can change the practices of its generation, and the thinker
who can make marginal practices central has developed into a preserver
of local practices -- a mini-thinker who by being open to the way practices
gather other practices and resonate with each other, can create a plurality
of worlds that resist the totalizing tendencies of technicity. In the pluralistic later Heidegger there is no more
talk of the history of being and hardly any talk of being at all. Indeed,
Heidegger came to think that there is an essential antagonism between
a unified understanding of being and local worlds. Given the way local
worlds establish their own internal coherence that resists any imposition
from outside there is bound to be a tension between the glorious cultural
paradigm that establishes an understanding of being for a whole culture
and the humble inconspicuous things. The shining of one would wash out
the shining of the others. The tendency toward one unified world would
impede the gathering of local worlds. Already in his "Thing"
essay Heidegger goes out of his way to point out that, even though the
original meaning of ‘thing’ in German is a gathering to discuss
a matter of concern to the community, in the case of the thing thinging,
the gathering in question must be self contained. The focal occasion must
determine which community concerns are relevant rather than the reverse.
Given this tension, in a late seminar Heidegger abandoned
what he had considered up to then his crucial contribution to philosophy,
the notion of a single understanding of being and its correlated notion
of the ontological difference between being and beings. He remarks that
"from the perspective of appropriation [the tendency in the practices
to bring things out in their ownmost] it becomes necessary to free thinking
from the ontological difference." He continues, "From the perspective
of appropriation, [letting-presence] shows itself as the relation of world
and thing, a relation which could in a way be understood as the relation
of being and beings. But then its peculiar quality would be lost."
What presumably would be lost would be the self-enclosed local character
of worlds focused by things thinging. It follows that, as mortal disclosers
of worlds in the plural, the only comprehensiveness we can hope to achieve
is our openness to dwelling in many worlds and the capacity to move among
them. Foucault allows for possible transformation too, but he
does not seem to have followed Heidegger's move beyond subjects and objects.
Whereas Heidegger, even in the Black Forrest, sensed that we are entering
a post-modern world where we will treat ourselves as resources to be enhanced
without appeal to subjectivity, Foucault who was teaching in Berkeley
and should have known better, seems, rather, to have believed to the end
that Christian and Freudian confessional practices and their product,
a subject that examines itself for its deep truth and a science of desire,
are the most important way bio-power subjectifies and so subjugates us.
"The West has managed . . . to bring us almost entirely . . . under the
sway of a logic of concupiscence and desire. Whenever it is a question
of knowing who we are, it is this logic that henceforth serves as our
master key," he tells us. Anguish over the deep subject so strongly supported in France
by Catholic and Freudian practices may be the source of what Foucault,
at the end of his life, admitted was his mistaken attempt to avoid questions
of agency and individual conduct throughout his work -- at least up to
his last book, The Care of the Self. In his last interview he says
of his work:
Once he acknowledges the need for an ethics, Foucault hopes
to break out of the regime of subjectivity by reappropriating the ancient
practices of care of the self. In an interview he distinguishes the Greek
individual from the modern subject:
In The Care of the Self, Foucault describes these
practices of self-mastery by means of which the Greek individual sought
to transform himself.
The goal of such care was to work upon oneself so as to
produce one's life as a work of art, not to find a deep inner truth.
A self that is work of art will not be a lucid subject,
an autonomous agent, nor a locus of deep self-analysis, but it presumably
will have its own kind of relative unity and stability. And it will be
based on taking over these old Socratic-Stoic practices. Furthermore, as Alexander Nehamas notes in discussing Foucault's
project, making one's life into a work of art can not consist in a retreat
into a private subjective world. Art itself is historically situated.
Artists always work within the limitations of a tradition handed down
to them. What counts as a beautiful or admirable life is determined by
current styles and so in return is able to change the sensibilities that
make it possible. We have seen that Heidegger’s resistance is a receptive
dwelling that preserves things and the practices they focus and keeps
them from becoming objects or resources; Foucault proposes an active self-creation
that resists letting the self be transformed into a subject. If he had
lived to follow out this idea Foucault might have provided an account
of how the self, in transforming itself into a work of art, could help
to transform or at least displace the current clearing. Thus in the end Heidegger and Foucault converge on the idea
of a human being formed by the current clearing, but at the same time
free by virtue of openness to and an understanding of this indebtedness.
Each sees that a sensitivity to one’s current style as a style
enables one to collect now-marginal practices from the past which in turn
allows one to engage in a loosely ordered multiplicity of activities that
give life meaning or beauty, while at the same time contributing to slowly
changing the totalizing background practices that endanger human freedom. Notes |
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Heidegger and Foucault on the Subject, Agency and Practices
Hubert L. Dreyfus Introduction Whatever their similarities and differences, one thing that
Heidegger and Foucault clearly have in common is that both are critical
of the Cartesian idea of a self-transparent subject and the related Kantian
ideal of autonomous agency. Yet neither denies the importance of human
freedom. In Heidegger's early work the subject is reinterpreted as Dasein
-- a non autonomous, culturally bound (or thrown) way of being, that can
yet change the field of possibilities in which it acts. In middle Heidegger,
thinkers alone have the power to disclose a new world, while in later
Heidegger, anyone is free to step back from the current world, to enter
one of a plurality of worlds, and, thereby, facilitate a change in the
practices of one's society. Likewise, for early Foucault, the subject
is reduced to a function of discourse; for middle Foucault, writing can
open up new worlds, and in later Foucault, freedom is understood as the
power to question what is currently taken for granted, plus the capacity
to change oneself and, perhaps, one's milieu. In short, while both Heidegger
and Foucault reject the Enlightenment idea of an autonomous subject, they
have a robust notion of freedom and action. And it will turn out for both
thinkers that each person can modify his or her cultural practices by
openness to embeddedness in them. All this needs a great deal of explanation.
We need to determine, on the one hand, just what each rejects and why,
and, on the other, what series of understandings of the self and its possibilities
for action each introduces. I. Early Heidegger's Substitution of Dasein for the Cartesian
Subject Heidegger's determination to break out of the philosophical
tradition is focused in his attempt to get beyond the subject/object distinction.
Heidegger opposes the Husserlian claim that a person's relation to the
world and the things in it must be mediated by something in the person's
mind: beliefs, desires, experiences, etc. -- what philosophers call "intentional
content." As he puts it:
He seeks to undermine this view by returning to the phenomenon
of everyday skillful activity. He finds that, when everyday coping is
going well, one experiences something like what athletes call flow, or
playing out of their heads. One does not distinguish one's experience
of acting from one's ongoing activity, and therefore one has no experience
of oneself as a subject causing that activity. Phenomenological examination shows that, in a wide variety
of situations, human beings are related to the world in an organized purposive
manner yet without the constant accompaniment of a subjective state
which specifies what the action is aimed at accomplishing. Indeed, at
times one is actually surprised when one's action is accomplished, as
when one's thoughts are interrupted by one's arrival at the office. A
huge amount of our lives -- working, walking, talking, eating, driving,
etc. -- is spent in this non-mediated coping mode and only a small part
is spent in the deliberate, purposeful, subject/object mode. Yet the reflective
is, of course, the mode we tend to notice, and so it has formed our common-sense
concept of action and has been studied in detail by philosophers. To consolidate his rejection of the primacy of the self-sufficient
subject, Heidegger rejects the Cartesian terminology which expresses it.
So far we have seen that in non-deliberate activities we
experience ourselves only as an open responsiveness to what solicits our
activity. Heidegger now adds that such unthinking activity provides the
background both for specific acts of ongoing coping and for deliberately
focusing on what is unusual or difficult. The basic idea is that for a
particular person to be directed toward a particular piece of equipment,
whether using it, perceiving it, or whatever, there must be a correlation
between that person's general capacity for skillful coping and the interconnected
equipmental whole in which the piece of equipment has a place. For example,
when I enter a room I normally cope with the tables, chairs, etc. What
enables me to do this is not a set of beliefs about rooms, it is a socialized
set of skills for dealing with such equipmental wholes that I have developed
by crawling and walking around many rooms. In Being and Time, Heidegger describes this general
coping as familiarity. And just as in ordinary cases of coping, where
Dasein is absorbed in its activity with no experiences of itself as an
action-directing subject, so when Dasein is simply at home in its situation,
there is no separation between Dasein's disclosing comportment and the
world disclosed: "Self and world are not two entities, like subject and
object . . . but self and world are the basic determination of Dasein
itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world". It is important to realize that our general background coping,
our familiarity with the world, is what Being and Time is all about.
Indeed, Heidegger says explicitly that "this familiarity with the world
. . . goes to make up Dasein's understanding of being." This understanding
of being provides a background understanding of what matters and of what
it makes sense to do.. Moreover, this background coping gives us a space
or a clearing in which things and people can show up as mattering
and meaningful for us.
Dasein does not produce the clearing by some act of
choice. Rather the background coping gives Dasein its sense of what sort
of being it is. And since individual Daseins can act only within this
background that determines what can show up as making sense to do, Dasein
can never be the fully lucid source of its actions postulated by the modern
understanding of the subject and of autonomous agency. II. Early Foucault on the Disappearance of the Subject
Foucault makes a similar discovery. After Madness and
Civilization through the period of The Order of Things and
The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault came under the influence
of French Structuralism. He was never, strictly speaking, a structuralist
since the structures he studied were historical and changed abruptly from
epoch to epoch, but he did share with structuralism a determined effort
to eliminate the Cartesian subject. He did not deny, any more than did
Heidegger, that human beings were conscious and did things. But, like
Heidegger, he argued that the subject as a lucid, autonomous agent, was
a product of particular practices and so could not have the causal agency
our culture attributed to it. For Foucault, in this period, the subject is a function
of discourse. Statements have to be attributed to some speaker, but what
is essential about any statement, Foucault argues, is its role in a system
of other statements. This role is independent of the psychological fact
that the statement was uttered or written by someone. Foucault concludes
that "the different forms of speaking subjectivity [are] effects proper
to the enunciative field." In The Order of Things, Foucault undermines our tendency
to think that each of us is a self-sufficient, meaning-giving cogito by
recounting the history of the construction of the Cartesian subject and
the Kantian agent. On Foucault's account both turn out be the product
of a "warped" and "twisted" form of reflection he calls the transcendental/empirical
double. Foucault notes that when man sees himself as involved in the world
and also as a transcendental source of meaning, he enters into a strange
relation with his own involvements. His use of language that he does not
master, his inherence in a living organism he does not fully penetrate
with thought, and the desires that he cannot control must all be taken
to be the basis of his ability to think and act. But if man is to be a
lucid transcendental source of meaning, this unthought must be ultimately
accessible to thought. And if he is to be autonomous, this unthought must
be dominated in action. Yet insofar as this unthought in its obscurity
is precisely the condition of the possibility of thought and action it
can never be fully absorbed into the cogito. Thus the lucid subject is
not only undermined by the realization that it is a construction of our
modern discursive formation and so has no causal power; the Kantian autonomous
agent is an internally contradictory ideal. Such considerations support Foucault's famous claim that
"man," Foucault's name for the autonomous subject, is a recent invention
and will soon pass away. Foucault sums up his view in this period in an
interview from May 1969.
III. Early Heidegger's Replacement of Kantian Autonomy
by Authentic Resoluteness Foucault is happy simply to look forward to the disappearance
of the subject; Heidegger, however, wants to find out what can take its
place. If Dasein is "thrown" into cultural practices what becomes
of human freedom? This is the question Heidegger faces in Division II
of Being and Time. To begin with, one must accept that there is a structural
limit to Dasein's autonomy. Heidegger calls this structural feature existential
guilt. Existential guilt does not denote Dasein's moral lapses or its
failure to choose for itself; it reveals an essentially unsatisfactory
structure definitive of even authentic Dasein. Even if Dasein has done
nothing wrong there is something wrong with Dasein -- it can’t be
transparent to itself. For example, a particular Dasein does not choose
to be brought up as masculine or feminine. Yet what is more important
is that each of these roles is so pervasive, so much a part of any skillful
comportment and the way various skillful comportments mesh together, that
one can never get clear about all any such role implies. One will never
be able to accept or reject it in toto. As Heidegger puts
it, "Dasein cannot get behind its throwness" (p. 330) [p. 284]. Dasein
must act on the basis of taken-for-granted practices that it can never
fully grasp. III. Authentic Resoluteness as a New Source of Freedom
Given its existential guilt Dasein has to give up the goal
of Kantian autonomy, but in so doing it gains a new sort of freedom and
responsibility. To be authentic, i.e. to own up to its own structure,
Dasein must be what Heidegger calls resolute. Dasein must take
responsibility for the understanding of being that it embodies but cannot
know. For example, men and women must take responsibility for gender roles
so pervasive and so much a part of bodily dispositions that they can never
be spelled out as a belief system. But precisely in accepting this limit
on its lucidity and autonomy, and thereby opening itself to the clearing
in which it acts, authentic Dasein gains the possibility of a new, more
powerful, freedom. At this early stage Heidegger holds that Dasein expriences
its thrownness and groundlessness in anxiety. If it resolutely holds onto
anxiety, that is, if it accepts its ontological limitations, it will give
up rigid roles and identities and become sensitive to marginal practices
from the past. So, for instance, resolute women will be able to be sensitive
to gender practices left in our culture from pioneer days. As Heidegger
puts it:
Marginal possibilities offer the individual non-banal ways
of perceiving and responding to the current situation. Heidegger's idea
seems to be that, by taking up such marginal practices from the past in
its current coping, Dasein can innovate in an otherwise banal and closed
world. Thus an individual can contribute to changing the shared world,
i.e. the understanding of the issues and what to do about them, for his
or her generation. Freedom to change itself by modifying its background practices
is the way Dasein can live a life worth living, even though it can never
be a self-sufficient, lucid, autonomous subject. But can Dasein, by abandoning
the illusion of subjectivity and autonomy, contribute to changing the
structure of the background practices as a whole? V. The Thinker's Role in the Establishment of Truth For everyday practices to give meaning to people's lives
and unite them in a community something must collect the scattered practices
of the group, unify them into coherent possibilities for action, and hold
them up to the people. The people can then act and relate themselves to
each other in terms of this exemplar. And the object that performs this
function best Heidegger calls a work of art. As his illustration of an
art work working, Heidegger takes the Greek temple. The temple held up
to the Greeks what was important and so established the meaningful differences
such a victory and disgrace in respect to which they could orient their
actions. The style of the background practices as a whole change
radically each time a culture gets a new art work. After such a change
different sorts of human beings and things show up. For the Greeks, what
showed up were heroes and slaves and marvelous things; for the Christians,
saints and sinners, rewards and temptations. There could not have been
saints in Ancient Greece. At best there could have been weak people who
let everybody walk all over them. Likewise, there could not have been
Greek-style heroes in the Middle Ages. Such people would have been regarded
as prideful sinners. Generalizing the idea of a work of art, Heidegger holds
that "there must always be some being in the open [the clearing], something
that is, in which the openness takes its stand and attains its constancy"
(PLT 61, G 5 48). Let us call such special things cultural paradigms.
A cultural paradigm is any being in the clearing that disclose a new world
or, by refocusing the current cultural practices can disclose the world
anew. Heidegger mentions five types of cultural paradigms--works of art,
acts of statements, nearness of a god, and sacrifice of a god, and the
words of a thinker-- but, for brevity's sake, we shall concern ourselves
only with two, the founding political act and the thinker's words. The
U.S. Constitution would count as a cultural paradigm for Heidegger. For
it is just the sort of political act that establishes an understanding
of what it is to be a state by articulating an understanding already in
that culture. Once established, because it is so important to the people
whose world it organizes, it becomes the center of a struggle to make
it clear, coherent and complete. Heidegger calls this tendency in the
practices to move towards clarity the world aspect. But any being resists
being completely clarified. Heidegger calls this resitance the world aspect.
The struggle between them sets up what he calls an outline which is the
specific style of the culture. The struggle between various interpretations
of the paradigm makes the culture historical since the present repeatedly
reinterprets the past and sets up a new future. The second cultural paradigm consists in the words of the
thinker. The thinker, by being receptive to the current practices (both
central and marginal), is able to reconfigure the practices and so bring
about a new shared style or understanding of being or can articulate the
understanding already in the practices in a diffuse way and so focus a
world. Thinkers, in the course of Western history, have named being as
physis, poesis, res, creation, and subjectivity/objectivity
and standing reserve and have thus contributed to establishing a succession
of historical worlds.
Founding such a new beginning, then, requires not genius,
but openness and receptivity to the marginal practices:
The new beginning is a founding leap -- an Ur-sprung
-- which by way of its grounding in the marginal practices from the past
bestows a new clearing.
Thanks to his total embeddedness in the current style of
his culture and by virtue of his receptivity, the thinker has the most
radical freedom possible for a human being. Heidegger calls this freedom,
freedom to ground. Before we return to the way all human beings can, in
effect, be mini-thinkers and change their local worlds, we need to follow
a development, parallel to the one we have been following in Heidegger,
in the writings of Foucault. V. The Author's Role in Establishing Discursive Domains We have seen that when Heidegger eliminated the subject
he at the same time introduced the authentic individual. This step has
no parallel in the thinking of early Foucault -- an omission he later
came to regret. Rather than proposing a unified, relatively stable, resolute
Dasein, Foucault was happy to find that the subject was replaced by a
dispersed, unstable function. In the same interview on the death of the
subject already quoted, Foucault continues:
But just as Heidegger did not long confine himself to the
narrow agency of resolute Dasein, so Foucault does not long retain his
view of the wholly dispersed agent. Rather, in his essay, "What Is an
Author?," Foucault develops the notion of a discourse founder who, like
Heidegger's thinker, open up a domain--in this case a domain of discourse. This essay is usually read as a continuation of Foucault's
attack on the subject, and, indeed, in it Foucault like Heidegger rejects
the idea of the author as a genius -- a psychological subject whose private
meanings and public expressions are crucial to understanding his work
and its effects. Rather,
The hermeneutic approach to the author as a subject with
deep and original meanings has to be rejected since the author is only
a social construction. Again, Foucault says of the author.
Foucault thus seeks to "call back into question the absolute
character and founding role of the subject."
But something more powerful than an author emerges from
Foucault's analysis. What Foucault discovers is a kind of writer who is
able to establish a local clearing which one might call a disclosive space.
Foucault calls such figures founders of discursivity. The open a new style
of discourse.
A founder of discursivity in opening a disclosive space
sets up a struggle of interpretations which starts a new line of history.
In contrast to a scientific founder like Galileo, whose work is made obsolete
by the new science he opens up, founders of discursivity never loose their
importance for their interpreters.
How do the current interpreters relate to the founders?
Not, Foucault insists, by looking for the deep truth hidden in their texts.
That would be commentary, and he rejects commentary as endless and fruitless:
Here Foucault seems to be criticizing Heidegger by criticizing
Hans-Georg Gadamer's view of interpretation, but this may only show that
Gadamer never understood Heidegger. For Heidegger the cultural paradigm is an inexhaustible
object of interpretation, not because the thinker was a genius or the
text too full of meanings, but rather because there is a necessary absence
in the cultural paradigm. One might think that just because the thinker
manifests the current understanding of being, he names what is so pervasive
and embodied it cannot be made fully explicit, but even this is a too
Hegelian and Gadamarian way to put it. Since what the thinker manifests
is the organization of the practices that constitute the background of
all intelligibility, what he or she explicitly says in the text cannot
be what is important. The understanding of being would pervade the work
without being themartized. What is important is the way the thinker's
words are attuned to the background. Heidegger's clearest formulation
of this difficult claim is in his essay "Reflection in Metaphysics," (1941):
This attunement to being is not attunement to a positive
but hidden truth. Rather the attunement manifests a necessary structural
absence.
Heidegger adds:
There is, then, no hidden truth to explicate; the understanding
of being is all on the surface in all the practices, and all over the
text as its own background of intelligibility. The thinker in his receptivity
experiences what is going on in the practices and is able in his work
to focus what is going on, but unlike a lucid agent, a thinker is never
able to explicitlyu articulate explicitly what he is experiencing. Yet
precisely because his work is changing the understanding of being, the
thinker is more perceptive than the most lucid subject and more effective
than the most persistent agent. Likewise, the interpreter or preserver
who returns to such founding thinkers can, by taking up practices from
the heritage in a new way, contribute to changing the present practices.
Foucault in "What is an Author?" holds a view close to Heidegger's
when he rejects commentary and introduces what he takes to be the right
kind of return to the text of a founder of a domain of discursivity.
Foucault also sees the effect such an interpretation can
produce:
Yet, Foucault seems to agree with Nietzsche and argue against
Heidegger when he says, in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," that genealogy
absolutely "opposes itself to the search for 'origins'" (p. 77). How can
we understand how Foucault can reject any return to origins as he does
in his discussion of Nietzsche and yet advocate a return to origins in
the cases of the founders of discursivity? The answer is that what Nietzsche
rejects as origins is the same rich truth that Foucault rejects when he
rejects commentary, while what Nietzsche proposes is a return to the point
of emergence, which Foucault defines as "the entry of forces .
. . the leap from the wings to the center stage." This corresponds almost
exactly to Heidegger's account of the origin of the work of art as the
Ur-sprung, the originating leap-- a leap a thinker's thought brings
about when, in that thinker’s saying, marginal practices become central
and central practices marginal so that the understanding of being is re-gestalted.
Foucault's account sounds like a more violent version of Heidegger's when
he says:
These similarities between the thought of Heidegger and
Foucault should not surprise us since it is really the Hegelian and Gadamarian
metaphysical notion of the continuing, unfolding, of some positive cultural
and personal identity that Foucault is opposing here -- a metaphysical
construct first defined and opposed by Heidegger. The notion of the origin as a originating leap, with
its account of the emergence of incommensurate worlds, is meant precisely
to reject this Hegelian teleological view of the implicit truth gradually
becoming explicit. For Foucault's Nietzsche too:
There is nonetheless, at this stage, a real difference between
Foucault and Heidegger. Just as for Heidegger the nullified self can unify
its life in resoluteness, the culture unifies itself each time there is
a new beginning. Heidegger thinks that struggle is always stabilized in
a world with an overall style, which for a time "gathers together all
the paths of destiny." On Foucault's reading of himself and Nietzsche,
there is no such tendency to stability.
The main difference between Heidegger and Foucault, then,
is that Foucault sees Nietzsche as affirming a continual instability in
the practices defining both the self and the culture, while Heidegger
points to the importance of a non-metaphysical but nonetheless essential
tendency towards gathering in the practices which he calls appropriation
(Ereignis). As we shall see Foucault is pulled both toward a Heideggerian
account of gathering and also towards Nietzschean dispersion. But once
we see, in passages like the above, that Foucault is arguing primarily
against Hegel and not Heidegger, we will be prepared to understand how
the Heideggerian picture of the way marginal practices coalesce to form
stable unities comes more and more to dominate Foucault's account of the
history of the West. Indeed, if we set aside the question of how stable
cultural practices naturally are -- a question on which, if it makes any
sense, Foucault and Heidegger deeply differ -- and ask how stable the
practices of an epoch can in fact become,
we will find Foucault's view approaching Heidegger's as the two thinkers
focus their analysis on the understanding of being characteristic of modernity VII. Heidegger and Foucault on the Modern Subject [ In his account of modernity, Heidegger begins by
telling us that "Metaphysics grounds an age, in that, through a specific
interpretation of what is, and through a specific comprehension of truth
it gives to that age the basis upon which it is essentially formed." Foucault
says more narrowly: "In any given culture and at any given moment, there
is only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all
knowledge whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice."
Both view the emergence of representation in the Classical Age as the
beginning of modernity that finally becomes explicit in Kant's interpretation
of man. Heidegger tells us of a radical transformation in our understanding
of being which took place in the 17th century: "What is decisive is that
man himself expressly takes up this position as one constituted by himself
and that he makes it secure as the footing for a possible development
of humanity." This understanding of man is an understanding of the subject,
not just as lucid and autonomous, but as the substitute for God, as the
self-certain source of all meaning. The essence of subjectivity after
Kant is to be the ground of all intelligibility. It follows for Heidegger
that
anthropological definition of technology." Modern technology,
Heidegger tells us, is "something completely different and therefore new."
It is a new ordering of background practices. In "The Age of the World Picture," Heidegger interprets
this new technological understanding of beings -- let us call it technicity
-- by looking at one of its greatest achievements, scientific research.
The direction of technological practices, Heidegger tells us, is toward
total order for its own sake.
In other words, technicity tends towards the treatment of
everything as resources to be ever more efficiently and flexibly ordered.
Heidegger seems to waver on the question whether, as
technicity reaches its final stage, it will accentuate subjects and objects
or eliminate them. In the end, however, he seems clearly to hold that
technicity can most efficiently treat both people and things as resources
when it ceases setting meaning-giving subjects over against objectified
things. He observes that soon there will be no objects and no subjects,
just "a system of information." and human beings will loose all freedom
as they are "sucked up as standing reserve." For Foucault, as for Heidegger, modern practices produce
a new subject that is the source of truth, but not the truth about the
whole world as in Kantian world picturing. Rather the Foucaultian modern
subject is constituted as the source of a deep inner truth about itself.
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault tells a rather
unNietzschean continuous story of how the gradual development of confessional
practices in the West produced a very stable, unified subject -- a subject
Foucault calls the man of desires. Such a subject is not only something
self-sufficient standing over against objects as in Descartes, or the
source of all meaning as in Kant; rather it is the locus of private desires
and intentions over against public actions. Foucault claims in The Care of the Self that the
Christians took over for their own purposes an elaborate technology of
self-examination that was already in place by the time of the Stoics.
The Stoics separated deeds from their motivating desire and used techniques
of self-care to control dangerous desires. But the Christian subject identifies
itself not with its public deeds but with his most private intentions,
desires, fantasies, and dreams. Moreover, since what one really desires
might well be forbidden and therefore disguised in some other desire,
this Christian subject has constantly to examine its desires to dredge
up its true motivations. Foucault quotes an early confessional
manual: "Examine . . . all your thoughts, every word you speak, and all
your actions. Examine even unto your dreams, to know if, once awakened,
you did not give them your consent. And finally, do not think that in
so sensitive and perilous a matter as this, there is anything trivial
or insignificant." This is the motto, he claims, of the suspicious, confessing,
subjects we have all become. When these confessional practices linked up with totalizing
scientific practices in the early seventeenth century, they produced a
new concern for the subject as a sexual being, and finally two centuries
later, a science of sexuality that was supposed to hold the clue to human
agency. Freud supplies the last stage in this constitution of the hermeneutic
sexual subject. He sees the self as a subject that needs to recover the
repressed truth of its desires -- the secret of its sexuality. He claims
to have developed a science of the subject, understanding
sexual desire as a natural kind about which we can discover laws of normal
development, functioning and causal effects. Foucault holds that this claim is unfounded.
There is no such natural kind, Foucault claims. Like the
Kantian autonomous subject, the Freudian sexual subject is an artificial
construction of, what Foucault calls, Power. Consequently, Foucault says
that for us,
So power is not exercised by modern subjects; it creates
them. Thus the search for meaning is not liberating but enslaving. Just
as sex is the illusory source of causation; the successfully analyzed
subject is the illusory center of freedom.] VI. How Can We Free Ourselves From Modern Subjectivity? Both Heidegger and Foucault maintain that the current why
the practices work is to coopt all deviation. Marginal practices are either
trivialized or transformed so as to be efficient and enhance life. [Examples
of playing with children, and back packing into the wilderness.] Heidegger
has a modest proposal as to how, despite the tendency of current practices
to coopt all deviation, we can modify, in small ways, the current understanding
of being. Human begins should become preservers, that is they should
cherish things which gather and focus local practices whether such things
be old stone bridges or the latest autobahn overpass:
Practices that produce such focal things as a celebratory
meal or playing music together resist the push towards dispersion which
is the flip side of technicity's tendency toward totalization. Furthermore, for Heidegger our ability to open ourselves
to the gathering of even technological things like the autobahn bridge
is a way of getting in sync with the style of our technological practices.
This getting in sync reveals our technological practices as a clearing
or mode of revealing, not as the way things have to be, and so frees us
from the compulsion to challenge all things into total ordering. At the
same time it frees us to have a plurality of different local situations
of relative stability and order. These various local worlds would be in
a loose sort of agreement in multiplicity while resisting total coordination
and mobilization. Such a loosely collected plurality of worlds would resemble
the polytheistic practices Heidegger admires in the Homeric Greeks. For late Heidegger, then, the resolute Dasein of Being
and Time who can change the practices of its generation, and the thinker
who can make marginal practices central has developed into a preserver
of local practices -- a mini-thinker who by being open to the way practices
gather other practices and resonate with each other, can create a plurality
of worlds that resist the totalizing tendencies of technicity. In the pluralistic later Heidegger there is no more
talk of the history of being and hardly any talk of being at all. Indeed,
Heidegger came to think that there is an essential antagonism between
a unified understanding of being and local worlds. Given the way local
worlds establish their own internal coherence that resists any imposition
from outside there is bound to be a tension between the glorious cultural
paradigm that establishes an understanding of being for a whole culture
and the humble inconspicuous things. The shining of one would wash out
the shining of the others. The tendency toward one unified world would
impede the gathering of local worlds. Already in his "Thing"
essay Heidegger goes out of his way to point out that, even though the
original meaning of ‘thing’ in German is a gathering to discuss
a matter of concern to the community, in the case of the thing thinging,
the gathering in question must be self contained. The focal occasion must
determine which community concerns are relevant rather than the reverse.
Given this tension, in a late seminar Heidegger abandoned
what he had considered up to then his crucial contribution to philosophy,
the notion of a single understanding of being and its correlated notion
of the ontological difference between being and beings. He remarks that
"from the perspective of appropriation [the tendency in the practices
to bring things out in their ownmost] it becomes necessary to free thinking
from the ontological difference." He continues, "From the perspective
of appropriation, [letting-presence] shows itself as the relation of world
and thing, a relation which could in a way be understood as the relation
of being and beings. But then its peculiar quality would be lost."
What presumably would be lost would be the self-enclosed local character
of worlds focused by things thinging. It follows that, as mortal disclosers
of worlds in the plural, the only comprehensiveness we can hope to achieve
is our openness to dwelling in many worlds and the capacity to move among
them. Foucault allows for possible transformation too, but he
does not seem to have followed Heidegger's move beyond subjects and objects.
Whereas Heidegger, even in the Black Forrest, sensed that we are entering
a post-modern world where we will treat ourselves as resources to be enhanced
without appeal to subjectivity, Foucault who was teaching in Berkeley
and should have known better, seems, rather, to have believed to the end
that Christian and Freudian confessional practices and their product,
a subject that examines itself for its deep truth and a science of desire,
are the most important way bio-power subjectifies and so subjugates us.
"The West has managed . . . to bring us almost entirely . . . under the
sway of a logic of concupiscence and desire. Whenever it is a question
of knowing who we are, it is this logic that henceforth serves as our
master key," he tells us. Anguish over the deep subject so strongly supported in France
by Catholic and Freudian practices may be the source of what Foucault,
at the end of his life, admitted was his mistaken attempt to avoid questions
of agency and individual conduct throughout his work -- at least up to
his last book, The Care of the Self. In his last interview he says
of his work:
Once he acknowledges the need for an ethics, Foucault hopes
to break out of the regime of subjectivity by reappropriating the ancient
practices of care of the self. In an interview he distinguishes the Greek
individual from the modern subject:
In The Care of the Self, Foucault describes these
practices of self-mastery by means of which the Greek individual sought
to transform himself.
The goal of such care was to work upon oneself so as to
produce one's life as a work of art, not to find a deep inner truth.
A self that is work of art will not be a lucid subject,
an autonomous agent, nor a locus of deep self-analysis, but it presumably
will have its own kind of relative unity and stability. And it will be
based on taking over these old Socratic-Stoic practices. Furthermore, as Alexander Nehamas notes in discussing Foucault's
project, making one's life into a work of art can not consist in a retreat
into a private subjective world. Art itself is historically situated.
Artists always work within the limitations of a tradition handed down
to them. What counts as a beautiful or admirable life is determined by
current styles and so in return is able to change the sensibilities that
make it possible. We have seen that Heidegger’s resistance is a receptive
dwelling that preserves things and the practices they focus and keeps
them from becoming objects or resources; Foucault proposes an active self-creation
that resists letting the self be transformed into a subject. If he had
lived to follow out this idea Foucault might have provided an account
of how the self, in transforming itself into a work of art, could help
to transform or at least displace the current clearing. Thus in the end Heidegger and Foucault converge on the idea
of a human being formed by the current clearing, but at the same time
free by virtue of openness to and an understanding of this indebtedness.
Each sees that a sensitivity to one’s current style as a style
enables one to collect now-marginal practices from the past which in turn
allows one to engage in a loosely ordered multiplicity of activities that
give life meaning or beauty, while at the same time contributing to slowly
changing the totalizing background practices that endanger human freedom. Notes |
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