Foucaults Alleged Irrationalism: The Legacy of German Romanticism in the

Thought of Michel Foucault

Corey McCall
Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion
Elmira College
Elmira, NY 14905
mccallco@hotmail.com
Abstract: Foucaults is often construed as an anti-Enlightenment thinker, along with
contemporaries such as Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Blanchot, and
others. Much of this criticism conceives Foucault as heir to Early German Romanticism
in some sense. This essay examines this claim by carefully examining the role of
German Romanticism in Foucaults work. I begin by explaining in the first section
precisely what I mean by the term Romanticism. In the second section, I look at the role
of German Romanticism in Foucaults early work, primarily in The Order of Things and
Foucaults essay on Blanchot, The Thought of the Outside. This section examines
Foucaults conception of language and literature.
In the final section, I explore the relevance of early German Romanticism for
Foucaults later work. Jrgen Habermas argues that this Romantic influence is most
evident in Foucaults Madness and Civilization, and that Foucault essentially outgrows
this infatuation with Romanticism in his later writings. I contest this claim through a
reading of Foucaults 1984 essay What is Enlightenment? In particular, I show that the
Romantic conception of Bildung or self-formation is essential for understanding
Foucaults reading of Baudelaire. My conclusion is that examining the influence of early
German Romanticism can help us to better understand Foucaults texts and philosophical
motivations and thereby avoid what Foucault terms the blackmail of the
Enlightenment, the idea that one must either be for or against Enlightenment ideals
rather than critically interrogating them

For a long time, Foucaults thought has been associated with a pernicious irrationalism.
Biographers and interpreters alike have seen Foucault as a threat to rationality and
aligned him with other purported irrationalist thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Maurice
Blanchot, Pierre Klossowski, and others. 1 While there may certainly be a basis for such a
conclusion based on a selective reading of Foucaults texts (which is not to say a
necessarily tendentious one), in this essay, I shall investigate the significance of this
charge. What precisely does it mean to label Foucault an irrationalist? A way I would

like to pose the question that I hope will eventually prove more fruitful is: What is the
significance of Foucaults relationship to Romanticism?
Commentators such as Jrgen Habermas, Joel Whitebook, Richard Wolin, and
James Miller all agree that in some way Foucaults texts, whatever their merits, are guilty
of embracing and advocating unreason. While some, such as Miller in his biography The
Passion of Michel Foucault, argue that this embrace of unreason was both liberating and
formative for Foucaults thought, others, such as Habermas and Wolin, worry that this
advocacy amounts to at least a potentially dangerous anti-Enlightenment stance. 2
Whatever value they accord to this apparent irrationalism in Foucaults work, these
writers all agree that it is an important element in his writings. According to these
commentators, Foucault is simply an anti-Enlightenment thinker. If true, such charges
would make Foucault heir in some sense to various strains of Romantic thought both in
France and in Germany. An example of this tendency that associates Foucaults thought
with Romanticism, from the ninth lecture of Habermas Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity will suffice to show how these various thinkers affiliate Foucaults apparent
glorification of unreason with Romanticism:
[Foucault] classifies insanity among those limit experiences in which Western
logos sees itself, with extreme ambivalence, faced with something heterogeneous.
Boundary-transgressing experiences include contact with and even immersion in
the Oriental world (Schopenhauer); rediscovery of the tragic element and of the
archaic in general (Nietzsche); penetration of the dream sphere (Freud) and of the
archaic prohibitions (Bataille); even the exoticism nourished by anthropological
reports. Foucault omits Romanticism from this list, aside from one mention of
Hlderlin.
And yet, in Madness and Civilization a Romantic motif comes through that
Foucault will later give up.
Just as Bataille discovers in the paradigmatic
experience of ecstatic self-unboundedness and orgiastic self-dissolution the
eruption of heterogeneous forces into the homogenous world of an everyday life
that has been compulsively normalized, so Foucault suspects that behind the

psychiatrically engendered phenomenon of mental illness, and indeed behind the

various masks of madness at that time, there is something authentic whose sealed
mouth only needed to be opened up. 3
According to Habermas, there is a Romantic tendency in Foucaults early work that
manifests as a glorification of unreason understood as an authentic limit experience. In
this paper, I do not wish to evaluate the merits of these various claims, for this is a task
that others have already accomplished. Let us assume that Habermas, Whitebook, Wolin,
Miller, and others are correct in their assessments of Foucaults irrationalism to one
degree or another. Rather, I shall pursue what is, to my mind at least, a much more
interesting question: Assuming for the time being that these commentators are all correct,
in what way is Foucault a Romantic thinker? What is the legacy of Romanticism in
Foucaults thought, and, furthermore, what relevance does Romanticism have for
Foucaults project? Along the way, we shall see that Habermas may not be entirely
correct in asserting that this Romanticism was manifest only in Foucaults early thought
of the 1960s
I shall develop this question in two ways. Following a brief initial section in
which I lay out what I mean by Romanticism, I proceed with an analysis of the
significance of Romanticism within Foucaults work. My claim in this section is that the
Romantic theory of language is significant for Foucaults analysis of the experience of
language in The Order of Things. Much has been written about the debt Foucault owes
Nietzsche, but few have considered the significant, though admittedly less decisive, role
of German Romantic writers for Foucault.
In the third section, I turn to the political question animating Foucaults writings,
and in particular, the question of critique. I believe that Habermas criticisms of Foucault

are too harsh and that Foucault is not simply an anti-Enlightenment thinker, but is rather a
thinker who wants to critically examine the possible dangers entailed by an uncritical
acceptance of the benefits of scientific rationality. Like the romantics before him, his
relationship to Enlightenment ideals is an ambiguous one. 4 However, as I said, I do not
want to rehash the terms of the debate between Habermas and Foucault. Instead, in this
section I will begin with a brief interpretation of Foucaults late text What is
Enlightenment? Of particular interest to me here is Foucaults treatment of Baudelaire,
and his concept of the flaneur. With this interpretation in place, I turn finally to the
Romantic conception of Bildung or self-cultivation. I will argue that the early German
Romantic conception of Bildung, if properly differentiated from the Hegelian and
humanistic treatments of this concept, can serve as an example of self-fashioning for us
today, alongside Foucaults own enlightening discussions of ancient and modern modes
of self-fashioning. Indeed, in this essay Foucault points to the askesis of modernity that
he finds present in Kants conception of Enlightenment and links this with the writings of
Baudelaire. Missing in Foucaults affiliation of Baudelaire with Kant is a consideration
of the German Romantic aesthetics of existence.

In short, this paper examines what it

means to allege that Foucault is in some sense affiliated with Romanticism and hence his
thought glorifies unreason in general. In addition to examining the complexities of the
relationship between Foucault and German Romanticism in both his early and later
writings, we shall see that the characterization of Romanticism as simply a repudiation of
Enlightenment ideals is overhasty, and, by extension, the identification of Foucault as
simply an anti-Enlightenment thinker underestimates the complexity of his thought.

1. What is Romanticism?
This section briefly describes how we understand the term Romanticism and the way we
intend to employ the term throughout.

The word defies simple definition. Indeed, the

historian of ideas Arthur Lovejoy claimed in 1923 that the term was the scandal of
literary history and criticism. 5 To deal with this scandal, he proposed that instead of
speaking of Romanticism, we speak of Romanticisms in the plural. 6 Recent authors have
followed Lovejoys approach by focusing upon the earliest period of Romanticism in
Germany, that of early Romanticism or the Frhromantik. According to thinkers such as
Simon Critchley, Frederick Beiser, and Manfred Frank, Romanticism, understood as a
German intellectual and literary movement, ought to correspond to the time during which
the journal Athenaeum was published. To take but one example of this approach that
helpfully summarizes the dates and individuals involved in early German Romanticism,
Frederick Beiser writes that
[he] would like to examine one brief period of intellectual life in Germany in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Scholars generally agree about
the about the approximate dates of Frhromantik: it began in the summer of 1797
and declined in the summer of 1801. There is also little disagreement about who
were the central figures of this movement. They were W.H. Wackenroder (17731801), F.W.J. Schelling (1775-1845), F.D. Schleiermacher (1767-1834), Friedrich
Schlegel (1772-1829) and his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767-1845),
Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853), and Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801), better
known by his pen name Novalis. 7
Elsewhere, Beiser also includes Hlderlin as a figure on the fringes of the circle. 8
Beiser argues that we must understand that Romanticisms relationship to the German
Enlightenment is much more complex than those who simply wish to characterize
Romanticism as a reactionary movement against the core Enlightenment values of
humanism and reason would have us believe. In some ways, Beiser argues, we must see

Romanticism as an heir to Enlightenment ideals, for example, in the Romantic reaction to

the French Revolution. 9 Furthermore, we must see this movement as something more
than just a literary movement, for Romanticism was a philosophical and political
movement as well.
Foucault understood the importance of Romanticism but was hesitant about its
metaphysical commitments; and, in particular, its organicism, holism, and aestheticism.
Foucaults ambivalence regarding German Romanticism in particular can be seen in his
response to an interviewer from 1966 concerning the work of Andr Breton. The
interviewers question concerns the importance of Breton for contemporary thought:
The most important thing, in my view, is that Breton established a clear
communication between these two figures that had long been estranged, writing
and knowledge. Before him French literature could well be concocted of
observation, analysis, ideas; it was neverexcept in Diderota literature of
knowledge. That is the big difference, I think, between German and French
culture. Breton bringing knowledge into expression (with psychoanalysis,
ethnology, art history, and so on) is, in a sense, our Goethe. There is an image
that needs to be obliterated, I thinkthat of Breton as a poet of unreason. A
different one should be placed, not over against it, but on top of it, that of Breton
as a writer of knowledge.
But this dismissal of literature (in the manner of Gide) is affirmed by
Breton in a singular way. For the Germans (Goethe, Thomas Mann, Hermann
Broch), literature is knowledge when it is an enterprise of internalization, of
memory: it is a matter of making a calm and exhaustive recollection of what has
been learned [connaissance], of appropriating the world, of reducing it to the
measure of man. For Breton, and the contrary, writing become knowledge (and
knowledge become writing) is a means of pushing him beyond his limits, of
forcing him to face the insuperable, of placing him near to what is farthest away
from him. Hence the interest he brought to bear on the unconsciousness, on
madness, on dreams.
C.B. Like the German Romantics?
M.F. Yes but the dreams of the German Romantics are the night illuminated by
the light of wakefulness, whereas for Breton dreams are the unbreakable core of
the night placed at the heart of day. 10
This passage makes clear that Foucaults ambivalence regarding Romanticism

may run deeper than suspicions regarding the Romantics metaphysical commitment.
What Foucault wanted, and what he thought he had found in 1966 in the thought of
Breton and Surrealism, as well as in thinkers such as Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski,
is a thinking akin to Romanticism shorn of any pretensions to an absolute somehow prior
to language or history, even as a Kantian regulative ideal. Despite Foucaults significant
reservations regarding Romanticism, we will attempt to show in the following two
sections that Romanticism remains significant for an understanding of Foucaults
thought. An even more pressing reason to reconsider Foucaults relationship with
Romantic thought can be cited, however. There is a need to think with Foucault the
question of who we are today, and a careful consideration of the relationship between
early German Romanticism and Foucaults thought will be necessary in order to
comprehend Foucaults genealogy of the critical attitude of modernity.

2. Foucault and the Experience of Language: Grammar and the Outside

Foucaults encounter with German Romanticism was in no way as decisive for his work
as his encounter with Nietzsche, for example. But Foucault does refer to the German
Romantics at fundamental points throughout his work, and these references are not
inconsequential.

This section examines the significance of Foucaults references to

German Romantic writers in his early texts, beginning with his essay on Maurice
Blanchot entitled The Thought of the Outside. Having examined the brief references to
Romanticism in this text, I shall turn to the last chapters of The Order of Things in order
to show that Romantic thought informs Foucaults conception of the materiality and the
experience of language and literature that he presents here. According to Foucault, the

importance of literature during the modern period stems from the idea that linguistic
meaning can be conceived independently of the speaking subject and hence the ideal of
language is no longer simply representational, an insight that Foucault discovers in the
writings of Friedrich Schlegel.
Finally, I want to look at the political significance that this conception of language
came to have for Foucault during his later period. Various attempts to distinguish
Foucaults literary writings from his more serious texts do a disservice to Foucaults
thought. 11

Insisting upon the link between the concept of language that Foucault

develops in the 1960s in essays such as the one on Blanchot and in books such as The
Order of Things demonstrates that Foucaults more literary writings are consequential, in
a way that recalls Romantic efforts to undo perceived unnecessary genre distinctions
between literature and criticism; poetry, criticism, and philosophy are all of a piece for
the German Romantics. For Foucault, Romanticism is important for its connections to
the Kantian critical project (witness for example his various references to Friedrich
Schlegel in Chapter Eight of The Order of Things, references I develop more fully
below).

Ultimately, Foucault and the Romantics diverge when it comes to their

respective understanding of the significance of the materiality of language, i.e. the idea
that language does not have to be a language that represents content to a disinterested
observer. Foucaults hesitation regarding Romanticism concerns the role of the subject
and the residual Cartesianism present in German Romanticism. 12

For Foucault,

following Blanchot, this experience of language leads to an effacement of the self in

modern literature, while for the Romantics, it leads to the absolute Ego.

At the beginning of his essay on Blanchot, Foucault refers briefly to Friedrich

Schlegel and connects him with the thought of Nietzsche, Sade, and Hlderlin. Blanchot
belongs to the lineage of those writers who have attempted to disengage speech from
thought in order to erect an autonomous space for speech, for which the word would no
longer be the sole property of the speaking subject. Foucault designates this attempt to
erect an independent space for speech the thought of the outside. He begins his essay
with a brief genealogy of this conception of language and thought freed of all propriety,
speculating that one would have to return to medieval mysticism if one were to undertake
rigorous genealogy of this attempt to divorce language from the propriety of the speaking
subject. The problem Foucault sees in beginning with the mystics conception of the
outside is that according to these mystics one leaves oneself only in order to truly find
oneself, to wrap and gather oneself in the dazzling interiority of a thought that is
rightfully Being and Speech, in other words, Discourse, even if it is the silence beyond all
language and the nothingness beyond all Being. 13
A speech truly shorn of the demands of discourse and the dictates of the speaking
subject is first articulated in the works of the likes of Sade, Hlderlin, and later in the
writings of Nietzsche, Mallarm, Bataille, Artaud, Klossowski, and, of course Blanchot.
Of Sade and Hlderlin, Foucault writes:
In the age of Kant and Hegel, at a time when the interiorization of the law of
history and the world was being imperiously demanded by Western consciousness
as never before, Sade never ceases speaking of the nakedness of desire as the
lawless law of the world. In the same period Hlderlins poetry manifested the
shimmering absence of the gods and pronounced the new law of the obligation to
wait, infinitely long no doubt, for the enigmatic succor of Gods failing. Can it
be said without stretching things that Sade and Hlderlin simultaneously
introduced into our thinking, for the coming century, but in some way cryptically,
the experience of the outsidethe former by laying desire bare in the infinite
murmur of discourse, the latter by discovering that the gods had wandered off

through a rift in language as it was in the process of losing its bearings (EW2,
150-151).
The writings of Sade and Hlderlin comprise a virtually secret countertendency to
German Idealisms search for the subjects identification with the Absolute, what
Foucault in this passage refers to as the interiorization of the law of history and the
world. These thinkers introduce a foreign element into the drive to.interiorize the
world, to erase alienation, to move beyond the false moment of alienation
[Entasserung], to humanize nature, to naturalize man, and to recover on earth the
treasures that had been spent in heaven (EW2, 151). Foucault in this passage no doubt
has Hegel in mind.
At this point in his career, Foucaults references to Friedrich Schlegel are
invariably references to grammar, and his passing reference in this text is no exception:
The sparkle of the outside resurfaces in Nietzsches discovery that all of Western
metaphysics is tied not only to its grammar (that had been largely suspected since
Schlegel) but to those who, in holding discourse, have a hold over the right to
speak.(EW2, 151).
Foucault will later link this question of who has a right to speak to the question of
critique, exemplified by his attempts to furnish a genealogy of critique in the 1983
lectures published as Fearless Speech. 14

However, Foucault clearly does not link

Schlegel to this question of who has the right to speak, but instead praises Nietzsche for
this thought. The place of German Romanticism and Schlegel in particular, in Foucaults
thought remains ambiguous. In order to address this ambiguity, I would like to briefly
investigate the place of grammar in concluding chapters of The Order of Things before
concluding this section with some thoughts on this strange experience of language
without a subject. My claim will be that this experience of language remains important

for Foucault, for it is an experience tied to how he believes his books can transform his
readers, an experience that I shall attempt to link to the Romantic conception of Bildung
and the question of philosophical and political critique.
Grammar expresses the will of a particular people, that indeterminate element by
which a people identifies themselves as such. 15 Through comparative grammar, we are
able to discern the inner life of a people, just as life posits the vital interiority of an
organism:
Just as the living organism manifests, by its inner coherence the functions that
keep it alive, so language, in the whole architecture of its grammar, makes visible
the fundamental will that keeps a whole people alive and gives it the power to
speak a language that belongs solely to itself. 16
During this period, at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the
nineteenth, language becomes linked not to knowledge but to the question and project of
freedom (OT, 291). Language is not understood as finished work but as an emerging
process, one linked to history, and, in the nineteenth century, to the question of language
and freedom. 17 Philology, as the analysis of what is said in the depths of discourse, has
become the modern form of criticism, writes Foucault, and he cites Marx, Nietzsche,
and Freud as examples. 18 As Foucault will later put it, the question regarding the nature
of language and indeed, the very questionability of language itself in modern literature,
becomes linked to the activity of critique.
A second consequence of this historical mutation (which is, as Foucault writes,
the discovery of history not as a narrative recounting of events but instead the condition
of possibility for events as such) is that language is no longer reducible to the language of
things, for language is no longer the transparent medium of representation (OT, 294).
Language acquires a density and a being all its own. This facticity of language means

that language becomes constituted as an object of study, alongside life as such and the
economical life of peoples. This also means that language can be linked with the thought
of the outside, that language is no longer the property solely of the speaking subject. It is
true that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this thought that language is not meant
only to represent things to a speaking subject leads thinkers to posit race as the locus of
language, culture, will, and biology; questions with disastrous consequences.

But

Foucault does not detail this particular history, either in The Order of Things or The
Thought of the Outside. Instead, his focus remains the critical dimension of language
that he finds in Blanchot, a dimension that can be linked directly to the thought of
Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx.
The history that Foucault recounts in these two texts is the history of the
appearance of literature, an appearance simultaneously made possible and contested by
philology:
Finally, the last of the compensations for the demotion of language [i.e. that
language is no longer the site and medium of representation] the most important,
and also the most unexpected, is the appearance of literature, of literature as
suchfor there has of course existed in the Western world, since Dante, since
Homer, a form of language that we now call literature. But the word is of recent
date, as is also, in our culture the isolation of a particular language whose peculiar
mode of being is literary. This is because at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, at a time when language was burying itself within its own density as an
object and allowing itself to be traversed, through and through, by knowledge, it
was also reconstituting itself elsewhere, in an independent form, difficult of
access, folded back upon the enigma of its own origin and existing wholly in
reference to this pure act of writing. Literature is the contestation of philology (of
which it nevertheless the twin figure) it leads language back from grammar to the
naked power of speech, and there it encounters the untamed imperious being of
words (OT, 299-300).
Philology, as the criticism and study of language and their origins, functions, and role in
society, contests this autonomy of language.

But this only renders the legacy of

Romanticism for Foucault more complex and ambiguous for it is implicated in both the
constitution of language as an object as philology and in the autonomy of language as
literature. On the one hand, Romanticism marks the birth of philology in Schlegel; on the
other hand, Romanticism inaugurates literature as an autonomous mode of expression.
From the Romantic revolt against a discourse frozen in its own ritual pomp, to the
Mallarman discovery of the word in its impotent power, it becomes clear what the
function of literature was. (OT, 300).

Simply put, the function of literature is to

contest the legacy of classicism at every turn; to contest the exultation of beauty in Kants
Third Critique, to contest the rigid genre distinctions classicism sought to cement, and to
contest the belief in writing as an autonomous activity (OT, 300): Literature as critique.

3. Foucault and the Critical Experience of Reading: The Relevance of Bildung

In this section, I turn from a consideration of the place of literature in Foucaults early
work to the question of language and critique in his later writings. The purpose of this is
twofold: First, to show that Foucaults discussion of literature in the 1960s remains
relevant for an understanding of his later texts and, second, simply to show that Foucault
expected his books to do something, to affect his readers in some way. Finally, I will
conclude this section with a brief consideration of the German Romantic conception of
Bildung in order to show the relevance of this concept for Foucaults critical practice.
In an interview from 1978, Foucault claims that all of his books can be
understood as experience books, and that his thought unfolds under the rubric of
experience. Furthermore, he claims that each of his texts should be transformative both
for his readers and for himself:

What I think is never quite the same, because for me my books are experiences, in
a sense, that I would like to be as full as possible. An experience is something
that one comes out of transformed. If I had to write a book to communicate what
Im thinking before I begin to write, I would never have the courage to begin. I
write a book only because I still dont exactly know what to think about this thing
I want so much to think about, so that the book transforms me and transforms
what I think. Each book transforms what I was thinking when I was finishing the
previous book. I am an experimenter and not a theorist. I call a theorist someone
who constructs a general system, either deductive or analytical and applies it to
different fields in a uniform way. That isnt my case. Im an experimenter in the
sense that I write in order to change myself and in order to not think the same
thing as before. 19

In his writing, Foucault experiments upon himself and upon his thinking. Of course, he is
playing upon the etymology of the word experience in this passage. An experience
is usually thought of as something that one undergoes and thus the word denotes a
passive state.

Through writing, Foucault claims he undergoes an experience that

transforms him. But writing does not just denote a state of passivity; it denotes an active
state in which one experiments upon the ethical material that one is in order to become
otherwise. This is consistent with the Introduction to the second volume of The History
of Sexuality, in which Foucault claims as his motivation for writing the desire to be free
of himself: writing is a concrete practice of critique and a concrete practice of freedom.
Writing is not merely a solipsistic endeavor on Foucaults part, for he also hopes
that his readers could have a similar experience through the act of reading his texts. Like
writing, reading has an active dimension for Foucault. He hopes that through the practice
of reading his readers can transform themselves, so that they too might become
experimenters.

In order to understand the relevance of the German Romantic

conception of Bildung for Foucaults practice of writing, we must understand what

Foucault meant by this ethical category of experimentation.

The most succinct development of the concept occurs in Foucaults late text
What is Enlightenment?, in particular with reference to the poet Charles Baudelaire. In
this text, Foucault attempts to articulate the significance of Kants conception of
enlightenment beyond its accepted narrow epistemological and formalistic significance. 20
He wishes to understand critique and the practice of Enlightenment as an attempt on the
part of individuals to articulate themselves. This self-articulation is not only a question
of language, of course. Elaborating upon Kants slogan for the Enlightenment as
humanitys attempt to overcome immaturity (heteronomy), Foucault attempts to show
how the practice of enlightenment can enable one to be autonomous. Foucault elaborates
upon this Kantian definition of Enlightenment by providing a genealogy of the concept of
the present, because Kants question and answer regarding the nature of Enlightenment
signal a new and distinctly modern way of conceiving the present, one that other ways of
posing the question had missed (Foucault cites Plato, Augustine, and Vico as other
thinkers who had posed this question of the significance of the present differently). 21
What is distinctive for Foucault in Kants presentation of the question is that he poses the
question in essentially negative terms: The present moment of Aufklrung might provide
an opportunity for escape, a difference between today, understood as a moment in which
freedom has become a possibility, and yesterday, in which it was not (EW, 305).
Unlike Kants other texts on history, An Answer to The Question: What is
Enlightenment? does not supplement his negative conception of freedom as freedom
from self-incurred immaturity with a positive belief in history as a stage of inherent
human progress. Instead, this text serves an example of what Foucault calls the attitude
of modernity. Foucault explains that by attitude of modernity, [he] means 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. No doubt, a bit like what
the Greeks called an ethos (EW1, 309). Foucault claims that an essential example of
this sort of response to the vertigo of the modern self-reflexive moment can be found
Baudelaires writings, and his attempt to ironically heroize the present and thereby find
meaning in the transitory present. Foucault designates Baudelaires ironic response to the
present and its elaboration of the figure of the dandy as an ascetic response to the
exigencies of modern life. The question with which I would like to conclude is the
question of whether the Romantic conception of Bildung or self-cultivation can provide
another example of an ascetic response to modernity alongside the examples Foucault of
Kant and Baudelaire that Foucault develops in this text.
One can perhaps immediately think of several reasons why it would be ludicrous
to associate the Romantic conception of Bildung with Foucaults reading of Kant and
Baudelaire. Foremost among these is the claim that Bildung itself is a humanist concept.
Surely Foucault would attempt to distance himself from an idea of this nature?
On the question of humanism, Foucault in What is Enlightenment? is quite
clear: We must avoid what he calls the blackmail of the Enlightenment, the choice
foisted upon us by solemn defenders of the Enlightenment that one must be either for or
against it. Whereas there are passages in Foucaults writings that seem to place him
firmly in the anti-Enlightenment camp, and thereby justify the criticism with which I
began this essay, by 1984 Foucault was writing that we needed to resist such polemics,
but still keep in mind the tension between humanism and the Enlightenment:

In any case, just as I believe that we have to free ourselves from the intellectual
blackmail of being for or against the Enlightenment, we must escape from the
historical and moral confusion 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 we have of
ourselves and of our past (EW2, 312).
Humanism must be distinguished from the Enlightenment, but the historian must also
acknowledge the complex interdependence between this amorphous, inconsistent,
diverse set of phenomena known as humanism and the equally complex problematic of
autonomy that is the leitmotif of the Enlightenment for Foucault. While I believe any
attempt to clarify the complexities of this relationship between humanism and the
Enlightenment would need to focus on the relationship between the humanist conception
of Bildung developed in Germany during the early eighteenth century and the
Enlightenment conception of autonomy and its particular articulation of Bildung, my own
ambitions are much more modest. I merely wish to point out the Romantic conception of
Bildung and its relationship to Enlightenment modernity as Foucault has interpreted it.
Bildung is a concept with a complex history spanning the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. It remained an important concept for twentieth century German
thinkers such as Adorno and Gadamer, and German educational theorists continue to
question its significance. 22

Foucault indirectly draws upon this tradition in his

discussion of Kant, for the idea that one could leave behind ones immaturity entails a
conception of Bildung understood as self-articulation or self-cultivation. Difficult to
translate, Bildung is sometimes rendered as culture, sometimes as cultivation or even
edification in order to provide the connotation of education, of coming into ones own,
or fulfilling ones potential. These more colloquial phrases betray the metaphysical

commitments of this concept, commitments that ultimately extend back to the Greeks. 23
Foucault argues that we must distinguish humanism from Enlightenment; I would argue
that we need to distinguish both of these traditions from that of Romanticism, and the
simplest way to distinguish them might be through the central concept of Bildung, which
they all share, and which they all develop in different ways.
Frederick Beiser points out that what distinguishes the German Romantic
conception of Bildung from its predecessors is the Romantic emphasis on aesthetic
education, itself a legacy of Friedrich Schillers encounter with Kants moral philosophy.
Schiller, anticipating Hegels later criticism of Kants moral philosophy in The
Phenomenology of Spirit, argues that Kants emphasis on duty precludes any meaningful
role for feeling and thus results in an empty ethical formalism. If we are to have an ethics
truly relevant for our lives, then we must discover the importance of an aesthetic
education, that is, an education in feeling.

The Romantic thinkers simply follow

Schillers lead in advocating a sentimental education, an education that does not commit
the sin of sacrificing feeling upon the altar of reason.
The Romantics are critical of the Enlightenment emphasis on reason, but they
appropriate key features of the Enlightenment program. The Romantic thinkers ideal of
Bildung, combined with their practice of writing and their emphasis on experiences
irreducible to the dictates of pure reason resonate with key aspects of Foucaults thought.
Foucault, too, thought that writing could transform our perceptions of the world and
thereby transform of our own conception of our place within it. Foucaults thought does
indeed have much in common with Romanticism, if we understand Romanticism
properly, as not simply the exuberant embrace of unreason but as in some sense a

continuation of the Enlightenment by other means, and if we similarly reject the

caricature of Foucault as a thinker concerned solely with destroying the grand edifice of
thought erected by Enlightenment reason.
1

A version of this paper was originally presented at the 2005 meeting of the Foucault Circle at Rollins
College. I would like to thank the participants of the conference for their probing questions and excellent
suggestions.
2
Jrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1987 [1985]), esp. Lectures IX and X; Cf. Critique and Power: Recasting the
Foucault/Habermas Debate. Ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Joel Whitebook,
Perversion and Utopia: A Study of Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1995); Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche
to Postmodernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); James Miller, The Passions of Michel
Foucault (NY: Anchor Books, 1994).
3
Jrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Trans. Frederick
Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987 [1985]).
4
On this relationship, see Frederick C. Beiser, Early Romanticism and the Aufklrung and
Frhromantik and the Platonic Tradition, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German
Romanticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
5
Arthur Lovejoy, On the Discrimination of Romanticisms, Proceedings of the Modern Language
Association 39 (1924); cited by Frederick C. Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early
German Romanticism, 6.
6
Ibid, 6.
7
Ibid, 6-7.
8
Ibid, 46.
9
Beiser develops this claim in Early Romanticism and the Aufklrung, The Romantic Imperative: The
Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2003).
10
Michel Foucault, A Simmer Between Two Words, Essential Writings of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984,
Vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Ed. James Faubion (NY: New Press, 1998), 172.
11
Jacob S. Fisher points out the importance of Foucaults more literary writings to his work as a whole in
What is an Oeuvre: Foucault and Literature, Configurations, 7:2 (1999). See also Timothy Rayner,
Between Fiction and Reflection: Foucault and the Experience Book, Continental Philosophy Review 36:
1 (2003).
12
Ultimately this hesitation concerns the importance of the relationship between Kant and German
Romanticism. For a consideration of the importance of Fichte for German Romanticism that with
Foucaults conclusions about the role of the subject in German Romanticism, see Walter Benjamin, The
Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume I, 1913-1926.
Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). As Beatrice
Hanssen explains, Benjamins ultimate concern was to demonstrate that the German Romantics sought the
autonomy of the work of art, independent of the concerns of the maker. See her Introduction to Walter
Benjamin and Romanticism. Ed. Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Benjamin (London: Continuum, 2002).
13
Michel Foucault, The Thought of the Outside, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume 2:
Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Ed. James D. Faubion (NY: New Press, 1998), 150; hereafter EW2.
14
Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech. Ed. Joseph Pearson (LA: Semiotext(e), 2001). Foucault claims that
his investigation of parrhesia is an attempt at a genealogy of the critical attitude in Western thought in the
Afterword, 170-171.
15
Although Foucault skirts the issue here, the idea of a people extends from its origins in Herder and
Fichte, through the German Romantics and eventually to the racist biologist theories of Nazism. Although
Foucault refuses to draw the connection here, he does make them plain elsewhere. See the Conclusion of
the History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (NY: Vintage, 1977) and his 1975-1976 lectures at the
College de France recently translated as Society Must Be Defended. Trans. David Macey (NY: Picador,
2003).

16

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Trans. Alan Sheridan
(NY: Vintage, 1971 [1966]), 290; hereafter OT.
17
Foucault cites Humboldt, who distinguished between the ergon of language and the energeia or activity
of language, OT,
18
OT, 298. Cf. Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, EW2, 269-278.
19
Michel Foucault, Interview with Michel Foucault, The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984,
Volume 3: Power. Ed. James D. Faubion (NY: The New Press, 2000), 239-240; hereafter EW3.
20
Foucault makes this explicit in a 1978 text that is in many ways a companion piece to this one. See
Michel Foucault, What is Critique? in What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth Century Questions and
Twentieth Century Answers. Ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press), 382-398.
21
According to Foucault, Plato conceived the present as a particular era of the world, Augustine thought it
in terms of a forthcoming event, and Vico saw it as a transition to something else. See Michel Foucault,
What is Enlightenment? The Essential Writings of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, Volume 1: Ethics. Ed.
Paul Rabinow (NY: The New Press, 1997), 304-305.
22
For example, see Jan Masschelein and Norbert Ricke, Do We (Still) Need the Concept of Bildung?,
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 35 (2003), 149-154.
23
Thus in order to truly do justice to the relationship between Foucault and this idea, one would have to not
only examine the role the idea played in early modern Germany, but also examine the roots of this idea in
ancient Greece and the role that it plays in Foucaults interpretations of ancient Greek ethics.