The Anthropological Question, Part One, Knowledge of Man and Transcendental Reflection
Notes on the first third of this book
All quotes are cited by page number; the reference is to Foucault M (2022) La Question anthropologique: Cours. 1954-1955 (Sforzini A ed), Éditions de l’EHESS-Gallimard-Seuil, Paris, France. The translation is my own.
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Introduction
There are four stages in the evolution of anthropology. First, in the late 1700s, the word begins to be used. Second, over the 1800s, the word is used in three competing senses: philosophical (Feuerbach, Fichte), naturalist (Broca), and theological (Wichart, von Rudloff), with overlaps. Third, the meanings regroup into a single thing, which is a comprehensive understanding of man and a critical grounding for the divisions between the sciences of man (Scheler, analysed by Husserl). Fourth, three forms of reflection on man emerge that make the anthropological theme explicit: unity of sense of man’s being (Landsberg, Litt, Häberlin, Keller), man as figure of transcendence and history of revelation of meanings of the world (Schlink, Brunner, Dinkler, Stomp), and man as foundation and source of all that is the world for him (also how lived experiences cohere and general structures of being. Straus, Kunz, Binswanger, von Gebsattel)
This purely semantic shift, which will not be used throughout the rest of the text, is useful to indicate how contemporary reflection has, over time, assumed the obligation to explain the sense of man’s being. In philosophy this becomes a crucial part of an investigation into the meaning of being. In the human sciences this becomes part of an analysis of the forms of man’s being (natural, historical, or social)
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A: Anthropology and Classical Philosophy
I
Classical philosophy developed treatises on man, but none of these needed to give anthropology as an autonomous domain. The people who did so tried to explain this in multiple ways (dualism for Straus, theology for Feuerbach, the a priori for Keller), but all of these are contradicted in later anthropologies
Aristotelian and Scholastic rationalism posit, between the types of rationality and the natural forms to which they give their meaning, an immediate cohesion. The example of the theory of motion and place is given. The ‘place’ of a body is defined as the immobile part of the environment that surrounds that body; as such, there must exist two completely immobile elements: the core of the world and the very last celestial sphere. ‘Far from the laws of motion being the condition of possibility of the world, it is the world that forms the condition of reality of the laws of motion’ (20). Circular motion, then, becomes the ontological mobility of eternal being; non-eternal beings have a motion that is, instead, the motion from non-being to being, which ends when the being is fulfilled. Heavy bodies move to the centre of the world, which just happens to be the centre of the earth. ‘So what constitutes the sense of being of being and makes possible its fulfilment in the form of eidos [form] is kosmos [world] as such, as the original truth and as the ground of being of all truth of nature […] Aristotelian and Scholastic rationalism is […] a rationalism for which nature is only the form in which the sense of being of the world as an original totality [is fulfilled]’ (22)
Galileo and Descartes, by contrast, use a ratio wherein the existence and perseverance of motion is independent of the world. With Descartes, something about the concept of the world has changed, such that investigating the world now necessitates investigating the cogito. ‘For Aristotle, the truth of motion is its completion, and its sense of being the world; for Galileo and Descartes, the truth and essence of motion is its incompleteness; and its sense of being can therefore only be elucidated at the level of a nature’ (23-24)
On Descartes’ first law of motion: ‘Motion is measured by the speed and magnitude of the parts of matter (mv). This mathematical truth constitutes the being of this motion and this motion has therefore no more reason to disappear than this mathematical truth. The question about the being of motion shifts [thus] and becomes a question about the sense of being of truth. While the world is questioned about its being, nature can only ever be questioned about the sense of being of its truth’ (24). On the second law, which replaces the primacy of circular motion with the primacy of linear motion: ‘Thus, the cosmological question about the element and the constitutive physical principle will be replaced by the question about the elementary, the simple, and the determining mathematical principle. Whereas the world is of the order of constitution, nature is of the order of determination’ (24-25). On the third law: ‘The principle of conservation: while the world has a history, an irreversibility, nature does not. While the synthesis of the world can only be written in terms of effects, the synthesis of nature must be written in terms of equality’ (25)
‘We are therefore dealing with an absolutely new domain, which is nature and not the world, and the Cartesian treatise on the World is in fact the death certificate of the world’ (25).
Problems are posed. 1. Whereas for Aristotle the problem of the being of the world led, through a causal chain, to the being of a God, for Descartes God is required instead by the essence of truth (Aristotle reaches God by questioning the existence of the world; Descartes reaches God by questioning the sense of being of truth). 2. Aristotle argued that the world was finite, by necessity. Galileo agreed that the world was finite, but this was presented as an accident. At last, ‘in Descartes the world is raised to the infinite dimensions of the essential necessities of nature’ (26). 3. With Descartes the world still exists, but we can get to it only through the finitude of man.
The world fades from view, replaced by the abstract structures of nature. The truth of being lies in this nature
II
The world fades from view, but it does not cease to exist entirely. The truth of being lies in nature rather than the world, but nature is announced in the world, that is, one can only access nature through finite human thought. Three problems appear in this regard: the problem of error; the problem of the status of sensible connaissance; the problem of the mistaken truth (see Malebranche, The Search after Truth, Cambridge edition, pp. 42-44)
All of these problems are matters of imagination. ‘Imagination is the element in which everything that is not an act of evidence is accomplished’ (29). It is, further, the general form of experience addressed to the material world, even without being determined by an external object. In essence, the image is that which creates the possibility of error, that which is error, but which tells an error in a way that allows man to access truth
‘Imagination is the set of transitory modes in which, for man — a corporeal being — truth is announced. The path of the imagination is the one by which one can go back from the world to nature’ (29). Once rationality has been pushed to nature and driven from the concrete world, imagination raises the problem of the world’s status and justification. Imagination ‘is at the same time the problem of man placed within his world, but with the requirement to restore him to the absolute truth of his nature’ (30). The question is how man, in his finitude and errors, can access the truth
We first see this applied to the body. For Descartes, there are three stages in taking a sensory impression into the imagination. First, the perceived object literally, physically imprints its shape on the body. Second, the image of the object is transported from the external sense to the inner, common sense (this explicitly is not the transmission of the modification of the body, but of the object itself). Lastly, the image moves from the common sense to the imagination ‘by the same means’ (31). What is imagined of the object is, specifically, ‘the geometric truth of the object’ (31; emphasis added). The sensory images given to imagination are thus perfectly accurate representations of nature. How, then, does the world come about? The world, the possibility of error, etc., does not come about from the body, we have just learnt; rather, it comes from the fact that the soul treats the body as if it were a single thing. The soul gives the body a unity which the body on its own does not possess
Imagination, then, is the point at which soul and body connect, which is when nature becomes world. ‘The world, as it is thus conceived, does not refer to the truth of man, but reflects, in its imaginary contents, only that by which man is not adequate to his nature’ (34)
Foucault then gives four characteristics of the world of the imagination
First, the world is finite in a way that exposes the infiniteness of nature. The soul is not open to the infinite paths of truth, so truth is given to it in a finitude, but this finitude can never close itself, but must be repeated. ‘Imagination is the movement of repetition by which the finite world, always multiplied by itself, discovers its truth in an infinite nature’ (35)
Second, the image does not cut out a finite portion of the infinite. Rather, the content of the image is itself infinite, and it is the imagination’s need to constantly move further that demonstrates this. The imagination is never satisfied with the finite objects of the world because reason, in both understanding and will, cannot be fully accomplished in them
Third, since the image really does enclose the infinity of truth within finitude, how can the image be justified? The image functions, basically, as a shorthand from of truth, which can be infinitely expanded on. Truth is given to perception already in this shorthand form, and this form (when analysed) shows the way nature becomes the world. This is necessary not by anything innate to nature, but because ‘God’s discourse to man cannot be exhausted in the terms of nature and with the vocabulary of truth’ (38) and must have another language, that of the world, laid over it. This is the opposite of the Kantian historical judgement
Fourth. If Adam had not had feelings [passions?] he would have spent his time contemplating God. The nature of man, and of Adam, is to be a soul which God has put in a body as a test. If Adam had not had the above-defined finitude of the world that pushes beyond itself, if he had been able to contemplate nature in itself, he would have done so without being put to the test. The finitude of the world is necessary, else Adam would have escaped his own nature. Natural judgement exists so that the soul and the body are not the same thing. Imagination is the revelation that I have a body. As a consequence, ‘This whole region defined by perception, image, feeling, natural judgement, does not in fact receive its truth from the truth of man; and the analysis of these figures of the world does not refer to a science of man, insofar as he constitutes them or insofar as he constitutes himself through them, but reveals on the contrary the impossibility of a science of man’ (39). In the world, the only thing that truly belongs to man is the freedom of his judgement, and this judgement is only true if it accords with what is true, and what is true is a matter for God. What belongs to man is the freedom of error. A science of man at the level of nature was already impossible, but now we know that a science of man at the level of the world is also not possible, since the truth of the world is referred always to God
Because the truth of the finite world, as revealed by imagination, is an infinite nature (which requires infinite understanding), no science of man is possible
In order for anthropology to become possible, two things will be necessary: first, one will need an aesthetic, that is, a reflection on man’s experience of his own finitude; second, one will need to analyse reason, to eliminate the idea of infinite understanding
III
But if man’s truth is not to be found in the world that is his but in nature, if it is separated from him, is it not because he has been exiled from the level of his nature? Are we not promised ‘a glimpsed victory by which man would no longer encounter in the world anything but the truth of his nature?’ (42-43) This is the question of the state of nature, the fall, the use of freedom, and the reward of salvation. If it were so, anthropology would be possible, and would give meaning not only to the world but also to nature
In one sense, man before the fall had his own truth, alienated by sin. Man was a continuous part of nature, but ‘this continuity of God’s wills in nature and of man’s movements in obedience, far from absorbing man into the truths of nature, authorised, or rather founded, man’s complete freedom’ (43). Once created, man was given commandments and left to be free, to freely exercise knowledge and to freely control his body. Man was one with his truth
At the same time, however, ‘even Adam’s world did not take its meanings from man himself, and if man could recognise himself in it, it was not insofar as he deciphered his own truth, but only insofar as he recognised the face of God in it’ (44). Adam had a finite mind, natural judgement, senses, and imagination like us. His mastery over his body did not show a truth that came from himself, it only allowed him to see transparently the truth of the world that comes from God. As such, ‘the happiness of Adam or the existence of a man who has not sinned’ (44) is evidence of transcendental, God-given meanings, preventing anthropology from being possible
Anthropology is fallen man’s attempt to transcribe the Word of God in his own, human language. It is, at the same time, the mask assumed by God in order to communicate with this man, to allow grace. Anthropology ‘does not tell the truth of man, but the disorder of this truth’ (45)
The first consequence of this disorder is that the world crystallises as a distance between man and nature; the world is the Word of God in the human language of imagination, so it is still inhabited by God, and it can therefore be the basis of a possible redemption, salvation, it is a place of grace. The world is also the cause of sin, as it is by focusing on the anticipated taste of the fruit, and thereby abandoning his focus on the presence of God, that man sinned. In sin, ‘the attention, by detaching itself from God, detached the world from nature and this was the sin’ (46)
As such, sin is not man’s nature either, his will remains good, but trapped within the world
What of the other end, when salvation has arrived; is man then the homeland of his own meaning and truth?
This would seem to be the case for Leibniz. In his depiction of salvation, man encounters his truth within the city of God (not by a coup de force, but by an infinite and fulfilling work). His truth is not given instantly, because truth is only ever found by continuous work, his ‘truth and perfection are but the integral of his errors and imperfections’ (46), his finitude. It will at the same time be happiness, which occurs only in the increase of perfection (hence it must be infinite). The most perfect part of the universe is the coexistence of human minds; man is perfect when he is a citizen of a city, since his perfection (and this is what makes it unique) is a boon to the perfection of other men. Thus, the truth of nature comes from the city, and nature used the mask of the world in order to become a human world, as a teleology. Thus, it would seem that the logos of man is the combination of nature’s truth and God’s Word, that the history of the world tends toward making the languages of man and God transparent to one another
In actuality, however, the logos of man doesn’t play the role of ontological source of man’s truth. The distinguishing fact of human minds (souls that have spirits) is that they can love God. They were created in order to know and love God, not for their own sake but in order to better express God’s being. The general order of nature is never to be sacrificed for the happiness of man, man must serve as an expression of God as architect; also, man is to express God’s glory as monarch, so evil is allowed insofar as it serves the ends of good, and any number of the damned may exist in order to demonstrate God’s goodness: ‘the happiness and perfection of man is to express the glory of God as the legislator of a city where man can be unhappy and damned’ (49). Ultimately, in the city of God man expresses the truth and being of God, not of man
‘In classical philosophy, man can never speak to himself the language of his truth, because he has in fact been stripped of his truth’ (50). He has been stripped of this truth for three possible reasons: ‘to the benefit of a nature that dissipates the world that Greek philosophy had once made the homeland of being and of man’ (50); or for a semantics whereby the figures of the world are purely symbolic; or for the perfection of God
Philosophy of the 1700s came closest to anthropology in its ethical reflection, rather than its reflection on imagination or truth, because the latter could not refer to man, since ‘nature as infinite truth was removed from him […] and the world was given the meaning of language’ (51). Man’s truth can best be deciphered by a nature which, through sin, tends towards finitude. For this point of view, that of grace, truth is extremely far from man, but the absolute is close to him. For anthropology, the absolute is far from man, and the truth is close to him (since he can announce it to himself): ‘the theory of grace is the negative of anthropology’ (51), in anthropology man understands ‘how the absolute only conceals for him the powers of exile, […] whereas it is only in truth that man is at home’ (51)
[He doesn’t specify it here, but the idea of man as originally at one with his truth, and to be at one with his truth in the future, a future reached by work on the basis of his finitude (a work that is the work of freedom), will be definitive for anthropology. The model of the city, of intersubjectivity as the point when man becomes one with his truth, will occur in Kant as the dinner party]
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B: Critical Thought and Anthropology
I
It may seem self-evident that, with the invention of critical thought, man would find that he is at home in truth, a truth that he can announce in the word of a purely human logos, anthropology. It is not, however, self-evident that the opening of the anthropological domain would necessarily manifest in critical thought. ‘The philosophy of the Enlightenment had in part already worked to deliver an essential theme: the truth of man can only come to light in the form of finitude’ (52)
With the eighteenth century ‘Happiness as the truth of man is no longer to be sought outside of man, and beyond his world, but in this world’ (52), happiness exists at the same level as man’s truth, as we see in the Treatise on Man by Helvétius, a text which also reveals that happiness is linked to man’s truth by science, pedagogy, and critique
The first significance of Condillac (and Diderot) is to posit a theory of sensation, of the image, which frees the image from its semantic role. For Condillac, the truth of sensation is not in the image it transmits, but in its function as a receiver of information; it does not transmit a preconstituted truth, it serves the genesis of truth. The senses do not give truth immediately, but in themselves they allow the communication by which one compares their contents to reach truth. They do not refer to a transcendent nature, but only to the subject’s mode of being; sensation is essentially first-person
Thus, eighteenth century thought had managed to make happiness and the image, two of the obstacles to anthropology, serve the purposes of the future anthropology. And yet it had not removed the most important of these obstacles, ‘the pre-eminence of the theme of nature, which obscure[s] the meaning of the world’ (54). So Helvétius found the science of education, which was so essential to man’s happiness, was a science of nature; so, too, did Condillac find that the senses still express nature insofar as they give us pleasure and pain. This is, essentially, because it had not elaborated and re-established the relationship between nature and the world (hence the journey out of the world, into foreign countries, to find that at home one is always in nature), which is what the Kantian critical project would do, and hence how critique would allow anthropology to come to be
II
Despite what Kant says in the Logic, anthropology is marginal for him, and would remain so in philosophy until Feuerbach. Critique does not ‘place the meaning of truth under the anthropological constellation of man’ (55), since neither faculties nor concepts are ‘subjective predispositions for thinking, implanted in us along with our existence’ (Kant, quoted in Foucault, 55). At the same time, anthropology learns from critique how to apply itself to its object, the human being, which is the most important object of all
To apply one’s knowledge is to judge, to determine whether or not a given thing falls within the domain of a particular law. It cannot be learned, but it can be determined a priori. In the empirical context judgement can be exercised, which sharpens it. Anthropology is a manual which outlines what can come under the domains of each form of reason, it seeks to help exercise judgement in the empirical realm, so it is ‘neither the rule of rules nor the condition of rules’ (56). There can be, then, anthropologies of knowledge, of taste, or of freedom. As this can be simultaneously too specific and too general, the experience of it will allow one to construct a schematism for the use of rules, ‘approaching not the diverse intuitive through time, but the concept through generalisation’ (57)
How has critique made anthropology possible? Through a revision of the concepts of totality, imagination, and negation, making anthropology culminate in an ambiguous anthropology of character
Totality has a double use before the critique, as that by which one moves from the set of parts to the composition of the whole (not to the whole itself), and as that by which one represents the principle underlying a given thing in a different, imagined thing (this latter, plus matter and form, is the world). In the critiques, one finds a distinction between the universe and the world. The universe is a ‘totality of determinations […] a transcendental notion’ (58); phenomena are totalised in the universe, a totality which is reached by indefinite progress. The world is a totality given in intuition, the analysis of the world allows an infinite progress, the world is a conditioned totality in time and space
Critique does not return to man and does not indicate that philosophy needs an anthropological foundation, then, because, though it insists on our finitude, this “our” is evidence of the ‘already transcendental regime of reflection’ (59). Finitude is the sense of being of truth, meaning truth has the sense of a given, but this is not sufficient for anthropology, which also requires man to receive ‘his truth as a given’ (59). Critical finitude is thus made sensible by ‘intuition in the form of space and time’ (59), whereas anthropological finitude takes its sense from intuition as the input of the senses
The old opposition between world and nature thus disappears, replaced by a distinction between a universe (‘where intuition would give itself the totality of its content, where nature, in its universality, would have the absolute originariness of the world of intuition’ (59)) and a realm of experience (‘where nature and its truths receive their original meaning, the world as it is given to a finite intuition’ (59)). This is why it is possible and necessary to interrogate man specifically in his world, insofar as he is one of the conditioned conditions. Thus we see Kant declare that anthropology is knowledge of the world. ‘Man is not an element of the universe, and is not to be understood from the intuitive totality of the unconditioned, rather, he is to be understood from the world where he is at home, in this conditioned totality of the world which is the condition of truth’ (59)
Imagination in classical philosophy is a mediation between pure truth (in the synthesis created by God) and the mind of man. With Kant, imagination is not a mediation, it is the means by which the mass of sense data is combined into a cognition, it is itself the synthesis, in man. For Kant, the senses no longer: obscure, the understanding does so when it puts things in order; command the understanding, but serve it in the common sense; deceive, which occurs when we mistake a sensation for the phenomena itself. ‘This is the body of anthropology as an analysis of man in his faculty of knowledge. Imagination speaks to man only of himself, and this is why the facultas signatrix is part of the imagination, whereas in classical philosophy imagination was only a product of this possibility of bringing signs into being’ (61)
Negation is revised at both the physical (well-being) and moral (virtue) level. Man is no longer a holy will, but a good will, and pain is the negation of pleasure rather than its limit. Happiness in unity with well-being cannot be established at once, in a transcendent stoke of power, because negation is never totally suppressible; happiness must be achieved only at the level of man himself, through infinite work. One must know which elements to combine to create a moral happiness
Character, in its ambiguity, is the culmination of anthropology. Ambiguous, since a man can have this or that physical character, but can either have or lack moral character. A man’s character can then be divided into three elements: his natural predisposition, his temperament or way of feeling, and his character or way of thinking. The first two, in a practical unity, suggest what man is able to do, the third what he is willing to do: anthropology leads to a ‘theoretical primacy in practice’ (62)
There are ‘four essential traits of Kantian anthropology’ (62): man is interrogated in his world; meanings have their genesis at the level of man; the absolute is removed, replaced by ‘the absolute character of finitude’ (62); theoretical work has a ‘primordial value […] for the return of man to his authenticity, i.e. to his truth in the form of freedom’ (62). These features, set free by critique, define all anthropology. Intriguingly, they fall ‘back to a naturalistic level or to a historicism such that if man [...] had full access to his truth, he lost at the same time the original access to truth’ (62). The anthropological question Kant poses in the Logic is not “What is the truth of man?” but “How can man inhabit the level of the truth?” The anthropology that Kant develops, however, ignores that man ‘lost at the same time the original access to truth’ (62), so that it asks instead ‘If man inhabits the truth, how can he make his home there? And what kind of truth must he inhabit in order to build and recognise his home in truth?’ (63)
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C: Anthropology as the Realisation and Suppression of Critical Thought
I
The critical project opened the way for an anthropology linked with critique, but, more specifically, it opened several paths for anthropology, which share a destiny and would characterise nineteenth century philosophy. This destiny is established in this way:
First. Critique shows that we exist with the truth, ‘we inhabit it and are inhabited by it’ (63), and so arises the anthropological question ‘in what mode do we find ourselves residing in this truth? How can this original kinship with the truth […] be manifested in our concrete experience of ourselves?’ (63) More specifically, there are three questions: How is the finitude of sensibility designated in the sensory, experiential field? How are the syntheses of experience announced in the perceived figures formulated by the understanding? How will practical freedom, the ability to judge, manifest itself in the search for happiness (three forms: perception of beauty, exercise of freedom, practice of virtue)? ‘In other words: how can man be for himself the phenomenon of his own faculty of knowing, of his own faculty of desiring, of his own faculty of judging?’ (64) In this sense, the goal of “phenomenology” (referring to Fichte and Hegel, thus pre-Husserl) is to show how the faculty of knowing (connaître) has as its phenomenon the world of knowledge (savoir), how the faculty of freedom has as its phenomenon the world of practice, and how the faculty of judgement has as its phenomenon the world of beauty. This phenomenology is the need to realise a unity between anthropology and critique
Second. Anthropology is not limited to finding the fact of man’s kinship with truth in the concrete world, it also seeks to discover what man must be in order that he can be one with truth. This question is already preformed in Kant’s critiques, as ‘both absolute subject and domain of extension of critique’ (65). So we find that critique should fall within anthropology, that anthropology should be a critique of critique, and this is where we find Hegel
Third. Since man makes critique possible, the question must become whether this thing called man is possible. To clarify: the conditions of possibility of metaphysics are in man, so, if we are to conduct the critique of these conditions, we must also aim critique at the truth of man. This truth of man must be understood ‘as already there, bearing the finitude of connaissance, an effective limit which ensures the perpetual failure of transcendental illusion’ (65) and as something that can only be achieved when it is discovered, when it is realised in a metaphysics. As such, critique must become ‘the uncovering and effectuation of the truth of man’ (65), it becomes a critique of real man, and this is where we find Feuerbach
At first, in Kant, one sees a distance established between anthropology and critique. And yet, in his successors, one finds the absolute necessity of mixing the two together, critique and anthropology must be ‘linked to each other by the triple requirement of a phenomenology, a critique of critique, and a critique of real man’ (66)
Critique not only makes anthropology possible, it makes it necessary
It is of the essence of phenomenology that man makes himself, in his concrete experience, into the rubric against which both his truth and the truth more generally are tested. The truth turns into his truth when he achieves knowledge; his truth turns into the truth when his freedom is exercised. The fact that the senses are taken as the genesis of truth, coupled with the fact that knowledge is achieved and freedom is exercised, means that phenomenology has no place for a nature, only a world. The role of world which Descartes and Galileo bestowed upon classical philosophy is reversed
The limits of connaissance are now grounded in the conditions of existence; ‘the finitude of savoir is the finitude of man’ (66), so that ‘the limit of connaissance is the split in consciousness; illusion is alienation’ (66) and ‘the sense of receptivity, passivity, and finitude is no longer’ (66) transcendent, but becomes a human language. This is the critique of critique, and it is in this that the obstacle of imagination is removed
‘The idea of a critique of real man discovers that the truth of error is the oblivion (oubli) and alienation of man himself, and that the infinite task of his finitude is the establishment of an authentic existence’ (67), removing the obstacle of happiness as conceived by classical philosophy
II
The interconnection of anthropology and critique characterised nineteenth century philosophy until phenomenology, which critiqued anthropology in its anti-psychologism. Whatever name it went by, this unification of critique and anthropology was assumed, sometimes as what defined philosophy from the beginning, sometimes as a goal
The anthropological question is, in the case of Reinhold, turned towards a theory of representation (Reinhold says that this erases critique and anthropology, but it serves to answer the same question). He says that Kant: produced a theory of knowledge when knowledge is a subspecies of something broader, for which Kant should have been searching, representation; took intuition and concept as self-evident, when he should have sought their condition of possibility in representation; arbitrarily limited the transcendental deduction to categories, when it should apply to all forms of representation. The function of representation in Reinhold is to be a point of universality from which critique — analysis of human knowledge — becomes necessary. Other such universal points have been sought (judgement as representation, representative faculties), and this kind of search defines the work of Reinhold, Schulze, and Fichte
The other approach of the nineteenth century was to turn the anthropological question towards anthropology as an empirical science. This approach produces a naturalist critique, which: makes the conditions of knowledge biological a priori; assimilates critique within a general scepticism of knowledge (upheld by a dogmatism regarding nature), and; considers man’s natural existence to be the ‘standard of his truth and authenticity’ (68). This is found in Müller, Mach, and Avenarius
Phenomenology proper defines itself against these currents. At first it seemed either to alternate between logicism and psychologism, or, in Merleau-Ponty, to look for a middle path. In actuality, this is it confronting the anthropological question, and the way it poses the ideas ‘of the truth to which man has access […] and of the access he has to his own truth’ (69)
The anthropological question, ‘with its double polarity towards an abstract theory of representation and towards a naturalist critique’ (69), is the philosophical element up to then, including Brentano
‘The phenomenological breakthrough will come the day Husserl avoids the fourth question, by asking about the meaning of truth in the name of and from truth itself, on the original ground of true being — and independently of man, whether one takes it in general from a theory of representation or takes it immediately in the context of a science of nature’ (69)
Within the attempt to find the starting point of critique we find attempts to suppress critique, that is, ‘to suppress it as an abstract reflection, developing in the form of the understanding, on the a priori conditions of knowledge’ (69) and, instead, ‘to found it in a real discovery of man, in the movement of his free rationality’ (69). In this attempt, man is the subject (concrete and original) of knowledge, the worker of objectivity, and the (living) content of his knowledge of the world. We find this project realised in a few figures
First in Hegel, in his attempt to begin with a philosophy of nature, in which he founds the subject, and to overcome this in ‘the objective spirit of morality and law, then in the free spirit’ (70)
In Feuerbach, in his attempt to realise man’s truth as self-knowledge, retrieving ‘man’s consciousness from the exile in which it is alienated, in order to make it adequate to its natural being’ (70)
In Dilthey, in his attempt to create a philosophy that would be the history of the successive Weltanschauungen, each of which limits the possibilities of knowledge and announces the truth of man. ‘Man will only be able to access truth from the concrete face of the Weltanschauung he receives; and conversely, he will only be able to access truth from his truth, insofar as it is the actual work that projects and cuts the profile of his Weltanschauung’ (70)