Essay question: No.

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No Freedom Without Limits

On the Treatment of Freedom in Michel Foucaults What is Enlightenment?

Introduction One might want go so far as to call the pursuit of liberty and freedom one of the most universal quests of humankind. Western history is deeply imbued with narratives of liberation and emancipation, slavery and struggle. And especially when one understands freedom as the independence of thought, as emancipation from the constraints and limitations of delusion and fallacy, the struggle for freedom comes to represent the notion of the eternal search for knowledge or truth that has so profoundly shaped the history of human thought. In his essay1 on Immanuel Kants 18TH century response to the question What is Enlightenment?, Michel Foucault identifies Enlightenment as a significant event in this very same history, an event that since then may not have fostered an answer to the fundamental questions of philosophy, but that has altered the vantage point from which these questions are asked and subsequently opened up new ways of thinking about ourselves, as potentially free beings. Foucaults full response to Kants response was published in 1984, shortly after Foucaults death, yet he had already engaged with it several times in his Lectures at the Collge de France, describing it as something of a blazon, a fetish for him (Foucault 2010: 72). The fundament of his interpretation of Kants text could be expressed in a slight modification of Kants What can I know?, as stated in his Critiques, into the critical inquiry rooted in the attitude of What can I know about myself at this particular point in
1 Michel Foucault (2000).What is Enlightenment?. In: Ethics. Essential works of Michel Foucault. 2 Michel Foucault (2010). The Government of Self and Others, Lectures at the Collge de France 1982-1983. Edited by Frdric Gros et al. Translated by Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hereafter cited in the text as Lectures.

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time?. This question of How are we constrained? (e.g. through Unmndigkeit, tutelage) can then be formulated as: How are we construed by our constraints and what are our limits? And finally, What can we do with(in) those limits?. Like truth or knowledge, freedom is not an essential ontological entity but can be situated in the possibility to change, to imagine otherwise. Thus allowing for a less absolute, but more practical, strategic approach to freedom. This paper will limit itself to a small selection of Michel Foucaults writing, primarily focusing on the development of Foucaults argument and his treatment of freedom in What is Enlightenment? but will attempt to extend the limits of its subject matter by contouring the effects of a change engendering critical ethos, thus encircling the possibility for a different life.

1. The Event of Enlightenment The understanding of Enlightenment as an event rather than an epoch is very much tied to Foucaults notion of looking at or writing history as a synchronic system of complex relations that leaves archaeological traces and changes our present understandings rather than retracing it as a diachronic chain of teleological causalities or unchangeable essentials. What Kants text effectively does, according to Foucault, is positioning itself in the very centre of a historical vertical cross section, by concerning itself with the contemporary moment. Its vantage point is not limited to the historicity of a particular tradition of thought, nor does it aspire to anticipate the future of humanity. Both of these attitudes ascribe themselves to fixed and detached perspectives, often entailing metaphysical or generalising thought that bypasses or disregards the present. Instead of outlining the principle of pure reason, Kants text reframes reason first as a possible human praxis or operation (rsonieren) and then examines the individuals use of reason in relation to specific determining circumstances (e.g. universal, public or free use). It is this turn to contemporary circumstance and practical relativity that

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marks Enlightenment as an event for Foucault. He claims that the significance of Kants minor text (WiE 303) lies in its focus on difference and referential modification, born out of a reflective attitude towards its contemporary reality (305). The repercussion of the event of Enlightenment can still be felt today, not necessarily because we have since set out on the straight path to unobfuscated truth, but in the way it has affected our attitude to reality. For that reason, we are still caught up in or shaped by the process of Enlightenment. Not because we are anticipating the dawn of a luminous era but because, ideally, we too are constantly assessing and critiquing our status quo, thereby reactivating the attitude of Enlightenment (312). Enlightenment is an event that has had an effect on philosophical thinking and at the same time it is an event because it could be made or identified as such by the philosophical attitude it had affected. Philosophys turn to the present engendered the discovery of Enlightenment as the present state of philosophy. Enlightenment made us

see philosophy [] for the first time becoming the surface of emergence of its own present discursive reality; a present reality which it questions as an event whose philosophical meaning, value, and singularity it has to express, and as an event in which it has to find both its own raison dtre and the foundation of what it says. (Lectures 12ff)

In pondering the present, the philosophical mind shifts attention not only to the circumstances that constitute today but also to its own relation with and role within the present condition. Kants text was published in the Berlinische Monatszeitung in 1784 as an answer to the question What is Enlightenment?, and it is the very novelty of the question alone, posed by a magazine to a general audience as an assessment of where we are at, that makes his answer so significant. The question implied a communal membership of its time, a form of participation with the present. This new philosophical attitude thwarts any notion of a distanced and distancing birds eye perspective on humanity and makes it impossible for the

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philosopher to dispense with an interrogation of his singular membership of this we (Lectures 13). The analysis of a state of oppression or immaturity thus becomes the task of exploring ones own actions, thoughts and responsibilities in relation to this state. Hence, the possibility for liberation from oppression is situated in ones own relation with oneself and the present. In regards to Kants text, Foucault observes:

From the very first paragraph, he notes that man himself is responsible for his immature status. Thus it has to be supposed that he will be able to escape from it only by a change that he himself will bring about in himself. (WiE 306)

In order to change, or to reveal a possibility to change within a given set of relations, the present has to be critically investigated and assessed. This is why, among the other terms that Foucault uses to denote it, he describes Enlightenment as the age of critique (308) and the appropriate ethos of Enlightenment as consisting in a critique of what we are saying thinking and doing through a historical ontology of ourselves (315).

2. The Ontology of Ourselves The historical ontology of ourselves can be understood as the thorough investigation of our relation with the present, functioning both as structural survey and physical inventory and exposing the way we come to understand ourselves through both external and internal technologies. Exposing the construct of our own ontology can thus open up the necessary gaps for installing freedom or freedom of choice in changing this understanding of ourselves, thus enabling us to act and think differently. Introducing the element of change into an ontology of ourselves exposes Foucaults understanding of the human nature as something that is ultimately malleable and not trapped in the search for eternal truth, striving and struggling to uncover its true being. That is why Foucault is so wary of the idea of humanism; apart from the fact that it is in itself a highly contested and interpretable historical term, it also

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implies a sense of integral or essential state of human condition or that there is an essential human nature to be disclosed (WiE 313ff.). In The History of Sexuality he identifies the deployment of sexuality as one of the constructed gateways on the human path to selfknowledge (Foucault 1998:1553). Turning a deaf ear to the essentialist cry of know thyself, Foucault sets out to explore the forms and modalities of the relation to self by which the individual constitutes and recognizes himself qua subject (Foucault 1992:64). Individual identity is thereby delineated to nothing more than an historical experience, shaped and determined by the games of truth, merely constituted as something that can and must be thought. (Modifications 7) However, one should not underestimate the complexity of this experience; Foucault takes great care in tracing its formation as a delicate interplay of the fields of knowledge, types of normativity and forms of subjectivity in a particular culture. The deployment of sexuality must be read in the context of its contemporary techniques of power (Right 150), both external and internal. Sex becomes a prime example for the internalisation of certain techniques of power. Foucault argues that sexuality was figured as being externally constraint and sexual liberation was seen as an act of liberating our true beings, while the same discourse that spoke of its oppression actually brought it to existence, construing it as the imaginary point that each individual has to pass in order to have access to his own intelligibility (Right 155). For Foucault, actual liberation or freedom does not lead to a goal or deliverance from oppression, e.g. sexual liberation, but in the power or access to change how we constitute ourselves. Despite his dismissal of what is commonly understood by it, he places the freedom to choose or to think differently in the subject in making it an agent of critique: 3 Michel Foucault (1998). Right of Death and Power over Life. In: The Will to Knowledge, The History of Sexuality: I. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin Books: 133-159. Hereafter cited in the text as Right. 4 Michel Foucault (1992). Modifications. In: The Use of Pleasure, The History of Sexuality: II. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin Books: 3-13.

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I shall thus characterise the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, ad thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings. (WiE 316)

Historical ontology can provide us with the necessary docking sites for criticism by illuminating the frontiers, the limits of what we are and how we are made to be that way. The implementation of critique as a catalyst for change lies in the grasping of what our existence owes to contingency and the modification of our limitations into a form of possible crossing-over [franchissement] (WiE 315). This is what Foucault describes as the undefined work of freedom (316). It is undefined because it is not aimed towards a distinct goal of liberation. It does not presuppose a limitless, uninhibited and free subject but it also does not point towards an essentially outlined human nature. It is not negatively defined as a search for ultimate coordinates but positively as a genealogy of what we can configure ourselves to be.

3. Freedom: An Autonomous Practice Yet, one could argue, how can there ever be a form of conscious resistance or freedom in choice, if there is no real outside of power? If even in the way that we desire to be free is subjected to certain codes, then freedom itself must be meaningless. It is true, writes Foucault
that we have to give up hope of ever acceding to a point of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits. And from this point of view the theoretical and practical experience that we have of our limits and of the possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we are always in the position of beginning again. (WiE 316)

This attitude complicates the common notion of political and social emancipation in which history is seen as a struggle for independence and the individual being engaged in a process that will eventually free itself from oppressive power. Although Foucault also looks at the

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individuals historical process of transformation, his timeline is different in that it does not pose at its end a state of autonomous and absolute freedom but the different set of codes and limits of a different present, a new present to which the individual relates and situates itself differently. However, Foucault does hint towards a political aim or agenda behind the process of transformation. The analysis of potentially oppressive power relations and their technologies can make us identify them as open strategies, while escaping the alternative of a power conceived of as domination or exposed as a simulacrum (1992:5). It is this exposing of power as an open strategy that allows us to insert the wedge of critical thinking, as a possibility to rethink and assess freedom and its limits and to find new ways to manoeuver within those open strategies. Freedom becomes a practice, a test of reality, the outcome of which may, despite its experimental nature, at some point enable us to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take (WiE 316). Because, despite holding the potential to change in our hands, this form of change should and would not occur abruptly, but in a tested and tried evaluation of the continuously critical assessment embodied by the historical ontology of ourselves. Foucaults ethos of thinking differently does therefore not necessarily result in a another utopian vision of the world, because, as we know from experience, such a hasty exit out of our contemporary reality has only led to the return of the most dangerous traditions (WiE 316). Instead, Foucault points towards the specific or partial transformations of the last twenty years, which, given the historical point of this utterance, refers to the social changes initiated by the protests of the late 1960s. These transformations have been tested and proven possible and they have affected our relations with the present. They have changed our relations to authority, relations between the sexes, the way in which we perceive insanity or illness (ibid.). So although Foucault seems to be quite concerned with mitigating the radicalism of his claim, there lies a very practical and political potential in his understanding of freedom as

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the freedom to think differently. The work we carry out upon ourselves is neither irrelevant nor contingent. It is a very conscious fashioning of our existence. So although a subject will always be constituted by a set of practices, knowledges or techniques, there is a desire to reduce this determination to a minimum, there is an aim to establish "what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects (WiE 313).

4. What To Do Thinking differently is more than just a philosophical exercise. Yet it is also the only possible philosophical exercise, it is the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself (Modifications 9). In regards to is own method, Foucault concludes: The object was to learn to what extent the effort to think ones own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently. (Ibid.) After changing the way we think, is it possible to change the way we act? Foucault postulates the attitude behind his notion of freedom as an ethos. A practical ethos arising from the historico-critical positioning of the self and the hope of a franchissement, a traversing and exceeding of the limits that we have come to understand as normative but that are in fact malleable, testable and traversable. It is the hope for or imagining of something that is different that constitutes this ethos, and thus we can also understand it as a different form of normative ethics. In that respect, perhaps Foucault simply conflates the Kantian What may I hope with What must I do into What may I hope to do?. The philosophical ethos behind the historical ontology of ourselves translates itself to thinking, but also to being and acting differently. In his Introduction to The Use of Pleasure, the second part of Foucaults History of Sexuality he describes a certain set of practices that he calls techniques of the self or the arts of existence. Foucault explains:

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What I mean by the phrase are those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria. (10)

The desire to transform oneself into a work of art is born out of the attitude of modernity that Foucault sees so eminently embodied by Baudelaires accounts of the artist in the 19th century. This attitude, the seed of which was planted in the reflective take on today of Kants time, is shaped by a boundless will to heroize and celebrate the present although, or better, precisely because this present is experienced as something fleeting and ephemeral, imbued with a dizzying sense of novelty (WiE 310). The need to capture reality will, like art, ultimately transform it into something else, something bigger, something that is more than natural or beautiful (311), creating the surplus of meaning of powerful symbols. For Foucault, the seizing and making ones own of reality represents the attitude of modernity, as an eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is (ibid.). This intensive relationship with the present is accompanied by an equally intense relationship with oneself, a rigorous regime aimed at the self and evoked by an unwillingness to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing resulting into the need to fashion ones existence in a mode of ascetism that turns the self into the object of an a intricate and elaborately wrought exercise: into a product of dandysme. Foucault states that

[m]odern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not 'liberate man in his own being'; it compels him to face the task of producing himself.

(WiE 312)

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Despite the fact that Foucault dismisses the idea of freedom as an ontological absolute: Nothing conveys freedom more effectively than such a statement. There is something overwhelming in the idea that there is no binding and essential human condition and something vast in the realisation that one is ultimately free (within the unknown limits of humanity there could be none for that matter). Free from destiny, free from the beckoning future anticipated by the narratives of traditional Enlightenment, but also free of the past as a form of teleological determinism. Yet I can see at least two distinct problems or areas of tension arising from this conception of unbound freedom. One is the compulsion to fashion oneself, the other is not unlike the notion of existential angst. The latter arises from a feeling of responsibility. As Kant mentions, if humans want to exit the state of immaturity, this change has to be brought about by a conscious, laborious and what Kant calls courageous personal effort. This element of duty, combined with the notion that there are no fixed or hidden human benchmarks, can fill the individual with terror, rather than enthusiasm. One could compare this to Kierkegaards image of the ultimately free human who anxiously glances into the abyss of possibilities. It is this sensation of vertigo that the awareness of power and responsibility over ones own life can evoke. Nevertheless, Foucault takes a good deal of the burden off our shoulders, in placing the individual in a complex network of relations. Yes, we are the masters of our own fate, but only to the degree that we can exercise power over the relations we have with ourselves and the world. Our influences on these networks, the ability to exercise power, as well as the limits of power, are still to be discovered (WiE 318). Fundamentally, this is the death of man, as we know him, or at least the death of a specific way that Western thought has fashioned the rational and autonomous subject. Reassessing the individual as a being that is intrinsically bound to its surroundings finally liberates us from the construct of the rational and fundamentally lonely subject that, in his notion of universality and singularity (in the sense of utmost completeness and integrity), with

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his place being at the root of all understanding, can distance himself from all things, and thus know them, by seeing them, safe and from a distance. And this allows him to fixate, to possess, to devour or conquer, yet he cannot, for the same reason that he posits himself in this centred position, distance himself from that core he calls self, and therefore he cannot see how it is constructed. Not realising how he is constructed restrains the subject from exercising the power to change. It is this idea of a unique vantage point from which the rational intellect experiences the world that is deeply entrenched in modern philosophy and that Continental Feminism for instance has tried to replace with the notion of intersubjectivity. Rather than thinking of the self as completely autonomous and fundamentally alone, intersubjectivity contextualises this independent self as a self that is in a constant relation with the Other. This is similar to Foucaults thought, where the individual and his idea of subjective autonomy will be always constituted through relations of control over things, relations of action upon others, relations with oneself (WiE 318). The hesitance or wariness of taking responsibility for ones life can also easily swing in the other direction. Freedom compels us to make ourselves the product of our work. The oppressive power that used to be experienced as an external force now becomes a force within ourselves. There is no difference between internal or external techniques of power anymore and freedom becomes a diktat, a drive that forces us to constantly reinvent or enhance ourselves. On paper, the old constraints of society have vanished. We now live in a time where, theoretically, no one is restricted by the emplacement he or she was born into. Social layers have become permeable, we dont grow up to become what our fathers and our fathers fathers were, women can move in society and choose their partners on their own behalf. Anyone can grow up to become the most powerful person on earth. It is no coincidence that the current office-holder was so hugely successful with the slogan: Yes, we can!. This, we are promised, is the password of our age. They who know it, who use it on themselves, have access to the boundless opportunities of this land of milk and honey we call contemporary

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culture. There is no excuse for not turning into the best possible version of yourself. Nonetheless, this overbearing possibility for change has not necessarily made us freer. On the contrary, we experience the unlimited possibilities of society as a burden, as a constant diktat that is considered all the more compelling because it feels like an entirely internal force and not some external coercion. We want it ourselves. It is the attitude we bring to bear on ourselves, as free beings. However, there is reason to believe that attitude may have a connection with the significant rise in neuronal or depressive conditions of this time of age. Burn-out has become a symptom of our infinite freedom. The exhausted self might ask if this work carried out upon itself will ever end. But it is unclear whether this hectic drive to exceed our own market value is really what Foucault envisioned when he wrote about the patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty (2000:319). In any way, there is no real freedom of choice if one only has the liberty to optimise the self within a given set of rules, disciplines and norms and never transcend these limits. Behind our breathless attempts to be more successful and efficient human beings lurks the fear of not being fit enough, of not fitting into society. We dont want to be left out, we dont want to be overtaken by others Really this is a game of optimisation that very much complies with a given set of rules and norms and despite the overall notion of freedom, it is played out in a very limited way. But freedom should be the freedom not to subscribe to an ideal, to a limited idea of what we are. Just because we try to work more, know more, do more, we do not necessarily change and influence what we work, know or do. Freedom should, ultimately, help us to get free from ourselves. Only then can we see what and where the limits are that constrain us. Foucault points towards the fact that we have to constantly question and test out the limits and the normative rules of our conduct. Freedom of change has to be brought about wilfully, but patiently, as persevering work but also as a form of experimental play. Ideally the play board or arena of this game should not be the battlefield of economic competition.

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Foucault admonishes that the difficult interplay between the truth of what is real and the exercise of freedom is not that easily enacted. Perhaps he wants to turn our attention to the need of finding the right space to exercise this great power that we humans wield, the power to shape our existence. Perhaps he agrees with Baudelaires take on dandysme and imagines the transfiguring play of reality to be produced outside society itself or in the body politic but in another, a different place, which Baudelaire calls art (WiE 312). A different place, a place that we today might associate with Foucaults idea of heterotopia as an effectively enacted utopia (Foucault 1986: 24)5. An alternative place that is not a utopic non-place, but actually atopic (Greek, atopia =a being out of place, without-place). An outside of all places (ibid.) or without-fixed-place that potentially relates to every place, all sites and all relations (27). Perhaps the possibility to transform or change should be rooted in the desire to be in the present moment, in order to conceive of a different present. A desire to capture the present and what is eternal (WiE 310) within it, recapturing it in an effort of artistic inventiveness, thus imbuing reality with the necessary imagination and creativity to turn it into something larger than life, something like art.

4525 words

Michel Foucault. Of Other Spaces. In: Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1986), pp. 22-27.

 References

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Michel Foucault (2010). The Government of Self and Others, Lectures at the Collge de France 1982-1983. Edited by Frdric Gros et al. Translated by Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. (2000) What is Enlightenment?. In: Ethics. Essential works of Michel Foucault. Edited by Paul Rabinow. Translated by Paul Rabinow et al. New York: The New Press: 303319. (1998) Right of Death and Power over Life. In: The Will to Knowledge, The History of Sexuality: I. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin Books: 133-159. (1992) Modifications. In: The Use of Pleasure, The History of Sexuality: II. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin Books: 3-13. (1986) Of Other Spaces. In: Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1986), pp. 22-27.