The Anthropological Question, Part Two, Anthropology as Realisation of Critique

Notes on the second third of this book

May 04, 2023

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.

A: Hegelian Anthropology

Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind has two anthropologies. First, there is the chapter called ‘Anthropology’ in the section ‘Subjective Mind’. Second, there is the entire ‘Subjective Mind’ section. In the first case, anthropology is ‘the immediate and natural form of the subjective mind’ (2022:84), but the second case is characterised by three features

First, the mind relates to itself immediately (in the part on objective mind, the mind relates to the world). Second, the being of the mind is being with itself, ‘in an immediate freedom that ignores the necessity of Dasein [being-there]’ (2022:84, square brackets editor’s). Third, it therefore ‘develops in its pure ideality, thus in the form of connaissance’ (2022:84), which therefore determines itself

These features are characteristic of the anthropology which is one with critique, and it is in the dialectic of ‘subjective mind that Hegel realises, performs, and overcomes critique’ (2022:84)

There are four problems of Hegel’s anthropology in the narrow sense

First. The soul is the immediate presence of mind in nature. Thus the problem of immateriality doesn’t come up, because mind is not a thing and ‘life is already the suppressed form of objective matter’ (2022:85). Further, since ‘The soul is the immediate universality of the body’ (2022:85) and ‘The body is the other being’ (2022:85), that is, since the relationship between the two is one of particularity and universality, the soul-body problem doesn’t come up (Note: the French call the mind-body problem ‘the problem of soul and body’, but it’s the same idea). ‘The soul can therefore be defined as the awakening of the spirit, but conversely the soul is only possible insofar as the spirit is already awake in nature. The soul is the awakening of this vigil. It is the unity and freedom of dawn’ (2022:85)

Second. This is why the soul already is its first negation and freedom in the things that seem to imprison it, with which it has a unity: qualities, alterations, Empfindung (sensation). Here Foucault refers to ‘the first three determinations of the natural soul’ (2022:142n4), given in Hegel’s §§392-403

Third. ‘But this recognised unity allows the emergence of feeling, of Fühlung as the interiority of sensation’ (2022:85). The dream is an immediate form of this Fühlung, it takes its content from the world but is a subjective form of the world, a “my own world”. In the first person, in other words, the dream declines the objective world to make a subjective world, Heraclitus’ ‘idios kosmos’ (2022:142n5). Madness is when this becomes fixed in objective consciousness. This is why we see the dialectic of madness: self is alienated from itself, there is a ‘siltation within subjectivity; and at the same time [a] fixation to the natural immediate being’ (2022:85) — the next move is that the consciousness concerned ‘retains the external forms of objectivity’ (2022:86), the personality is split when the soul is dissociated from consciousness. ‘The objectivity of consciousness will work within the subjective content of the soul’ (2022:86)

Fourth. Habit (as Gewohnheit; unclear if this is a category of which habit is an element, or the word Hegel uses for habit) sets out a home for itself in its own subjectivity, but one that is neither the dissociation characteristic of madness nor the expressiveness characteristic of the dream. ‘It is the work of consciousness that recognises itself in the sphere of the soul: it is the unity of sleep and wakefulness, of the silence of character and din of madness. To have a habit is, for consciousness, to be at home in its soul’ (2022:86)

B: Feuerbach’s Anthropology

Introduction

Feuerbach also seeks to realise critique by ‘carrying out its content at the level of an anthropology’ (2022:86). This necessitates that critique is no longer an a priori determination of connaissance, since anthropology is concrete and must ‘develop a content of experience’ (2022:86) that’s not simply connaissance. How is it possible for a concrete essence to be the ground of a critique? There are two prerequisites

First. The essence concerned must be ‘the concrete a priori, not only of all possible connaissance, but of all real experience’ (2022:87), so anthropology must be ‘a return to concrete immediacy, a rediscovery of the most primitive forms in which man inhabits his own truth’ (2022:87). Thus, one must be most concerned in philosophy with the matter of the origin of connaissance, with establishing a better means of investigation; the old ‘speculative philosophy that finds the concrete abode of man only in the element of absolute savoir’ (2022:87) must be abandoned. This is why one must, according to Feuerbach, abandon Hegel and make a philosophy that will unite (or reunite) ‘the abstract and the concrete, the speculative and the empirical, philosophy with Leben’ (Feuerbach, cited in Foucault, 2022:87). ‘Philosophy will thus be the end of philosophy, […] for the reason that it is a return to the immediate, a rediscovery by man of his most familiar homeland’ (2022:87)

Second. The philosopher of this philosophy cannot be the Hegelian philosopher, ‘a determined individuality brought to the absolute’ (2022:88). It must be, rather, ‘humanity in general as it is constantly embodied in determined individuals’ (2022:88). ‘And the sign that one is a philosopher is that one is not a professor of philosophy, because philosophy is not the business of a determined function, but of the whole essence of man […] But if the philosopher is the universal man, any realisation of philosophy as the uncovering of the concrete essence of experience must be, at the same time, the realisation by man of his essence. […] And this is why the new philosophy is linked to the emergence of a new man; it is basically only the reflected demand of the new man’ (2022:88). Foucault then quotes Feuerbach distinguishing between philosophies responding to philosophical needs and philosophies responding to the need of man directly in the history of mankind

For critique to be realised in anthropology, then, two conditions are necessary. Critique must unfold ‘in the domain of the most original and immediate experience’ (2022:88), and ‘anthropology, as an analysis of the concrete essence of man, [must be] only the other side of a critical realisation of man by himself’ (2022:89)

For Feuerbach, then, philosophy must locate, ‘in the element of sensibility in general, in the space of immediate intuition’, the ‘ground of objectivity’ and ‘horizon of presence where essential truths come to light’, the ‘original locus of Denken and Sein’ (2022:89)

In sensibility there is an originarity which is that Denken belongs immediately to Sein. If the unity of these two is ‘Hegel’s absolute savoir, we must say that this savoir is not constituted at the end of the journey of consciousness’ (2022:89) but at its beginning. Absolute essence and sensible essence are one and the same, the key step taken by The Essence of Christianity

‘That the sensible essence is the absolute essence does not mean that the sensible element is the absolute of the essence, but that in this sensible element the essence is present absolutely, in flesh and blood’ (2022:89). Sensibility and understanding must not be confused, the understanding must interpret the senses and has its own truths, ‘But this work is not done above sensibility in the abstract space of a non-sensible presence; it is done as a universalisation of the provinces of sensibility’ (2022:90). Thus ‘Geist is nothing other than the essence of Sinnlichkeit [sensibility], the ‘universal unity of the senses’’ (2022:90, square brackets editor’s), but, at the same time, ‘the words we read with the senses are not arbitrary signs, but determinate, commensurate with things, and characteristic expressions’ (Feuerbach, cited in Foucault, 2022:90). Denken is not a way of transcending Sinnlichkeit, but the grammar of the latter, the way of connecting the words of the senses

Any and all relations to an object, including those of the most abstracted thought, take place within sensibility. This sensibility can only exist insofar as man is a concrete essence in real relationships with other concrete essences (we are far from Leibniz). ‘Denken cannot be the ether of truth, nor the sense of being of the subject. It can only ever be conceived as the predicate of an essence’ (2022:90), and the concrete ‘essence of man is the immediate unity of thinking and being’ (2022:91). This essence ‘is neither purely thought being nor pure thought of being’ (2022:91), it is existence. ‘Man is the existence of the object, of the self, of the absolute’ (Jodl, cited in Foucault, 2022:91). ‘So this ‘phenomenal reduction’ is not a sensualism, in the sense that it does not show in sensibility the ‘native form of the phenomenon,’ but that it releases the original index of existence. As concrete existence, man is dedicated to sense, not significance’ (2022:91). [The relationship between intentionality and sense-direction should be underscored here]

Does this ensemble of relations between essences require nature to exist as the objective realm in which these essences relate?

‘In fact, nature is not the truth of the sensible relationship and anthropology is not a natural science of man’ (2022:91). This is because there is a distinction between nature in man’s mind and body and nature outside of man. Man cannot be understood through nature, as a natural object, and ‘nature refers to itself as everything that is external and independent of man’ (2022:91)

Thus, nature is the ‘absolute exteriority’ of man, and so ‘one should not try to understand nature from the forms of objectivity that have been constituted by man himself, nor man from natural objectivities’ (2022:91)

Geist and Denken are not part of physiology, they must be known only by thought. Conversely, nature’s ‘necessity is neither human nor logical, neither metaphysical nor mathematical’ (Feuerbach, cited in Foucault, 2022:92), so man cannot be the basis for understanding nature

Yet, even though man and nature (both concrete essences) are absolutely other, they are still connected, ‘because this absolute otherness is also a substantial relation, a relation which is that of the imagination’ (2022:92)

‘Imagination is the form of relationship in which the absolute otherness of man and nature is fulfilled, and at the same time it gives a concrete face to their relationship. It is the natural-becoming-human, the dawn of the world, the light on which the profiles of objectivity will be cut’ (2022:92)

The relationship between man and nature is not one of cause and effect, then, but expression. Expression is not the objective manifesting itself, secondarily, in subjective experience; nor is it the subjective constructing an idea of the objective. It is, rather, the content of the relationship between man and nature, it is that which makes the objective and the subjective possible to define. Expression thus includes ‘the foundation of objectivity, since law, order, etc., are only expressions’ (2022:93) and the possibility of religion, ‘the alienation of man’s relationship to nature’ which makes ‘nature resemble man’ and express ‘something supernatural’ (2022:93). Religion is the error of expression

‘Importance of this lineage, this filum [thread]: imagination, expression, alienation, which is correlative to the genesis of the world’ (2022:93, square brackets editor’s)

There is also a human-becoming-natural

Man as concrete essence is the absolute only insofar as he is a species, a Mitmenschen, and so only in relation to the woman, which ‘implies the presence of the child and the whole becoming of the Gattung[species]’ (2022:93, square brackets editor’s). Man is only capable of becoming the universal philosophical subject, the absolute, ‘insofar as he cannot be abstracted from woman’ (2022:94), and this is the only way he can escape his naturally destined death

This necessary plurality requires ‘an essential relationship, love, which constitutes the advent of the universal in a destiny open to death’ (2022:94). If egoism refuses personal death, refuses to sacrifice itself, it must bear with it the death of others. ‘On the contrary, love is the movement by which man’s nature, his universal essence, overcomes its natural determinations, thus overcomes death, but [has] to assume it as an individual destiny’ (2022:94, square brackets editor’s). Death is the manifestation of love by which man achieves universality as a species and shows a fundamental being-with-the-object as part of his own concrete essence

‘In the assumed death and in this unfolding love, man, as an individual determination, reveals himself at the same time as a universal essence, that is to say, he manifests his essential possibility of being an individual who encounters others and of being at the same time the truth of others and of himself, in the element of universality’ (2022:94). In sexuality we find man’s encounter with other men, which is ‘an a priori of Dasein’ (2022:94). Only subsequently, and through this intersubjective basis, does man encounter objects. ‘Objectivity is the intersubjective, or rather interhuman agreement’, and so the ‘question about objectivity is secondary to the question about sexuality’ (2022:94)

Man’s relationships with nature are always in the form of otherness. In the first case, expression is the natural-becoming-human, is the nature proper to the imagination. In the second case, love is the human-becoming-natural, is the woman

Such an otherness is the basis for all relationships between subject and object, so anthropology can never be ‘an objective science of the human subject. Anthropology is situated at the level where subject and object do not exist, it is the birth of their separation: neither an objective science, nor a science of the subject, nor a science of nature, nor a science of man, but a science of the natural-becoming-human and of the human-becoming-natural, it is a science of Wirklichkeit [concrete reality] — that is, of the expression of nature in man and [of] the love of man in nature. Savoir of savoir and savoir of love, it is philosophy’ (2022:95, square brackets editor’s)

Philosophy, anthropology, and the science of the Wirklichkeit are one and the same

III

Analysing this Wirklichkeit, ‘which is both the homeland of concrete human existence and the privileged domain of anthropology’ (2022:95), teaches us three things

First. The essence of man is three things: the community of Mitmenschen, the unity of the community and the individual, it is defined by the “I-you” relationship, not an ego; ‘the real and concrete unity of the singular and the universal’ (2022:95), as both an individual doomed to death and a species realised in love; ‘the real unity of the particular and the general’ (2022:96), as that which, through sensibility, can access other concrete essences. The essence of man is, then, ‘to be the concrete universal, it is to be the unity of experience and savoir, of sensation and thought, of the finite and the infinite, of understanding and reason. The unity of perception and nature. Man is the reason of the world’ (2022:96)

Second. At the level of sensibility, Denken and Sein are the same thing; and yet, ‘in the experience of truth, Sein manifests itself as other, as not being Denken’ (2022:96); ‘and this otherness is constituted by others’ (2022:96), it is because Sein exists also for others that it is the other for Denken. Man must go through himself in order to reach truth, that is, man is the ‘truth of the truth’ (2022:96). This is not a contradiction, an opposition between a sensualism and a humanism; it is ‘the constitution of an anthropology where man appears as constitutive of truth for man’ (2022:96)

Third. ‘Man is the objective existence of scientific objectivity, and singularity of the forms in which it unfolds’ (2022:96). Sinnlichkeit constitutes my being, I am my body (and you are yours), while also being the first path to being; as we are our bodies, ‘the condition for our existence is that I am here and you are there’ (2022:96), space is that in which we localise ourselves, and it is from and as such localisation that space becomes concrete space (Foucault draws a distinction between this and contemporary anthropology, presumably Husserl’s Ideas II); ‘space is not an a priori condition of intuition, but a condition of man’s concrete existence’ (2022:97). Time, also, is not simply a form of intuition, nor is it lived time. Time, rather, is an ‘originary dimension of our experience’ (2022:97), because it is form and condition of life, because life exists only as development. This is why Hegel’s claim that ‘the absolute essence develops from itself’ (Jodl, cited in Foucault, 2022:97) gets reversed into Feuerbach’s claim that ‘Only a being that develops and unfolds itself in time is an absolute; i.e., a true and actual being’ (Feuerbach, cited in Foucault, 2022:97). Man, then, is also the objective existence of objectivity

In sum, the Wirklichkeit begins in the total otherness of man and nature, but is itself the becoming-human of nature and the becoming-natural of man, and ‘brings us into the presence of an original solidarity of man and the world, of man and truth, of man and objectivity’ (2022:97)

Feuerbach is uncertain or at least unclear as to whether this truth of man’s being as the being of world, the being of truth, and the being of objectivity is something to be fulfilled at the end of an arc, or something present already in man as his essence, as that which must be uncovered

We are thus led to a problem. ‘Should anthropology present itself as a return to this lost homeland, a restoration of authenticity and disalienation — or, on the contrary, as an awareness and project of man’s journey towards his fulfilment and his search to decipher the face of his truth in the movement of his being?’ (2022:98) And consequently, is man’s duty to the truth an ethics of repetition or an ethics of the future?

‘What we see behind this question is finally the philosophical concern with the problem of absolute beginnings and ends, the motif that the conditions of truth can be both […] in the actual content of accomplished truths […] as well as in the original ground from which they arise’ (2022:98). The question ‘of man’s original kinship with truth’ (2022:98), which we saw was at the foundation of critique, the anthropological question, is a ‘repetition of the origin’ just as much as it is a ‘fulfilment of history’ (2022:98). Feuerbach’s anthropology presents itself as if it were a materialism, a sensualism, a naturalism, despite being none of these, because of its essential inability to return to the origin, its equivocation between origin and destiny. ‘The work of Ludwig Feuerbach allows us to [see] one of the essential problems of contemporary philosophy taking shape; before Friedrich Nietzsche and apart from Søren Kierkegaard, it is one of the paths of return of Hegelianism, bringing the problem of the fulfilment of truth back to that of the original sense of certainty’ (2022:99)

‘This equivalence, or rather this equivocation between repetition and fulfilment, which is born of the effort to realise critique, but which seems to frame it between the post-Kantian themes of history and the pre-Kantian themes of nature, this equivocation appears clearly in the moment when critique takes place as a critique of religion’ (2022:99)

The question of why critique can only be critique of religion is essentially the same as the question of what religion is

Feuerbach rejects two ideas, from Christian rationalism in the Romantic era, which are key also to Hegel: ‘that religion can be an immediate form of philosophy, a moment of Denken’ and ‘that Christianity can be the truth of all other positive and historical forms of religion’ (2022:99)

Against this Feuerbach has a claim in three parts. First, that which Christianity presents as the ‘rational purification of other religions’ (2022:99) is actually the general essence of religion, manifested positively. Second, this essence is not a form of philosophy, but ‘the feeling in which the original fact that we are bound, enveloped and chained by the universum of being is indicated. ‘It is the feeling of our dependence on the universal order of things’’ (2022:100, embedded quote from Jodl). This claim is taken from Schleiermacher, who posited the idea that religion is essentially the affective feeling (Gefühl) of absolute dependence on the universe. Third, opposed to Schleiermacher, this Gefühl is not simply an affect; it is, rather, ‘man’s constant experience of his finitude and of all that goes beyond it, both in the movements of his heart and in the actual actions he performs’ (2022:100). As a result, religion negates the otherness of man and nature that was the staging point of philosophy, the philosophical truth of man. The genesis of religion shows that it does exactly the opposite of the movement of the Wirklichkeit (which, one will recall, overtakes, covers, and denies this otherness)

In religion, man makes nature both supernatural and inhuman, ‘by endowing it with free will and omnipotence’ (2022:100), that is, by projecting nature as an infinite version of himself. Nature becomes supernatural in that projecting oneself into nature does not make it human, but makes it unnatural, in the form of the miracle. Nature becomes inhuman, in that one can only act on the hidden, human forms of nature by a sacrifice, since they are inaccessible. This is religion’s use of the imagination, a use which is fundamentally opposite that which it is given in anthropology, and which is termed fantasy. ‘Religion is the alienation of the human becoming from nature in the imagination’ (2022:101)

Man also experiences his dependence on nature in his desire. Man has infinite needs and desires, but finite satisfactions. However, the species develops infinitely, specifically by sexuality, such that ‘the linkage of desire to the natural conditions of the individual suggests a possible fulfilment at the level of a completed totality’ (2022:101). This is why God is projected as the bearer-to-come of the achievements and qualities of the human species. Hence also belief and prayer. Belief is the means by which desire is taken beyond the human limits of desire and made infinite. Prayer is the idea that, by communing with the will of God, of the Gemüt, man can make his own desires determine the fate of the world. Belief and prayer are the opposite of anthropology’s love; through belief and prayer, man’s desire is externalised, he forgets his limits and makes nature subordinate to a will modelled after himself. In this opposite of love, man becomes unnatural, his becoming-natural is alienated

These alienations — of nature-becoming-human and man-becoming-natural — are absolutely intertwined, but we should not forget the twofold nature of this process. When nature’s becoming-human is alienated in fantasy and objectivity by the miracle, man’s becoming-natural is alienated in the infinite subjectivity of belief. Feuerbach writes: ‘The essence of nature, as different from nature, i.e. as a human essence, the essence of man, as different from man, i.e. as a non-human essence — such is the essence of God, and the essence of religion’ (Feuerbach, cited in Foucault, 2022:102)

The movement of the Wirklichkeit began from the radical otherness of man and nature and posited a man-becoming-natural and a nature-becoming-human in order to overcome this radical otherness. Directly opposed to this, religion begins with a man understood by nature (by an omnipotent, supernatural, inhuman understanding that has set out all of history as the satisfaction of desire, and by his own nature which, separate from him, controls his behaviour by making him desire), and, covering over their difference, gives a man-becoming-inhuman and a nature-becoming-unnatural, separating them. ‘This is, in the strict sense of the term, alienation’ (2022:103)

This alienation poses two problems for us. First, when imagination becomes fantasy and love becomes desire, the possibility arises of creating an abstract world, an Unwirklichkeit, which thus comes from the same concrete genesis as does the Wirklichkeit; when, therefore, does alienation actualise? Second, the birth of religion begins in the affective experience of being understood (Begriffensein) by nature, an affective experience which ‘is absolutely original for our existence’ (2022:103). Is religion not, then, a truth equally valid as the philosophical one, but which arises instead from Gefühl and completely contradicts the philosophical truth?

Thus, alienation leads us to the idea that man’s relationship to nature is, at its core, ambiguous. On the one hand, ‘man experiences his individual finitude on the horizon of a nature which exceeds him’ (2022:103-104). On the other hand, the essences of man and nature are defined by their otherness, ‘and if man can find himself in nature, and nature in man, it can only be in the movement of this surpassed otherness’ (2022:104)

We see, then, the emergence of a tension that will be ‘one of the most constitutive lines of tension in all anthropological thought’ (2022:104). On the one hand we find the distinct motif of a quest to find the origin, a homeland for man; ‘on the other hand, the motif of a determination of the essence of man, of the proper dimensions of existence, and of the movement by which it ultimately takes on its natural sense, by discovering the human face of nature’ (2022:104). ‘This is the tension between the demand for an originary foundation [and] the demand for a purification of essence’ (2022:104, square brackets editor’s); it is posed in a confused way by Feuerbach, but it will also be the problem of phenomenology, and many discourses in between

Feuerbach will try to preserve this double need, and so gives himself the project of ‘taking up in its truth the original and fundamental existence of man in his nature’ and ‘expressing and fulfilling it in an essence purified and completed by the work of critique’ (2022:104). He is to take the foundation of religious experience as his positive content, ‘developing it in a domain where man and nature are not alienated, but preserve both the rigour of their essence and the authentic movement of their becoming’ (2022:104)

Atheism, then, is not a negation of theism. Rather, theism is the negation in which ‘nature, the world, and humanity’ (2022:105) are sacrificed to God, this God being the essence of man once ‘affected by the negative index of the imaginary and the fantastic’ (2022:105). Atheism takes up man’s original experience in nature, the Wesenkern (essential core) of religion, and develops it in ‘the affective reality of human nature’ (2022:105)

Feuerbach thus ties the development of human nature to the originary, and accounts for the content of religious experience

Atheism, then, is the positive content (the meaning and value of nature and humanity) that theism negates; it is the ‘truth of religion, the Herausarbeitung [elaboration] of its ideal Wesenkern’ (2022:105, square brackets editor’s)

The Wesenkern of religion: man experiences an overcoming in a natural sense, when he is subject to cosmic forces, and in a moral sense, when he is made aware of the wills of others. These overcomings, originary by essence, are to be, in the work man conducts or in the Wirklichkeit of his essence, simultaneously acknowledged and cancelled out

The natural overcoming meets its match in Bildung (culture), whereby man develops a savoir of nature that makes man a god over nature; the moral overcoming meets its match in ethics, whereby man comes to recognise the will of men generally as good, and the will of the individual as evil. In this movement by which man overcomes the original overcoming: man becomes a God; ‘that in which the human essence unfolds its Wirklichkeit’ (2022:106) is not the individual but the collective subject of savoir and will, the human species

‘If atheism is the death of God, on the other hand it is the effective fulfilment of both the human becoming of nature through Bildung and the natural becoming of man in ethics. It is thus the realisation of the human essence in its Wirklichkeit […] and the theogony of humanity’ (2022:106)

This is why Feuerbach insists sometimes that philosophy be rid of religion, and other times that philosophy become religion

Consequently, the concept of Wirklichkeit is transformed into an ambiguous historical fulfilment. ‘On the one hand, it is a question of a natural becoming as much as a human becoming, and the subject of this historical achievement is the human species. It is even to the extent that the species intervenes that the dimension of history unfolds. This is a problem from which evolutionism will emerge’ (2022:107); on the other hand, if man fails to understand his truth, ‘this natural becoming can constantly be alienated in a supernatural becoming’ (2022:107)

This is why imagination, if it is not made into Bildung, can become fantasy. It is also why love must be made into an ethics lest it become sacrifice

Philosophy, as the realisation of critique, cannot be founded as an anthropology

Feuerbach is faced with two solutions, between which he cannot choose

On the one hand, anthropology belongs to the development of Wirklichkeit, in which case it is simply a repetition of history

On the other hand, anthropology is itself the work by which man is disalienated, in which case ‘history is only a repetition of anthropology’ (2022:108)

C: Real Man and Alienated Man

Introduction

The problem of alienation opens three questions for us, each of which can be phrased in two ways. First, What is the sense of critique?, which is the same question as What is the sense of the historical conflicts and contradictions of the present age? Second, ‘How can man answer for his own essence?’ (2022:108), which is the same question as In what circumstances and historical shifts can man be disalienated? Third, Is philosophy the end of philosophy?, which is the same question as Is revolution the beginning or end of history? Each of these problems is the problem of history. They are not two-sided (philosophical and historical), rather, the ‘sides’ are the same question: ‘the philosophical sense of critique is the real contradiction; […] the philosophical responsibility of man for his own essence is revolution; […] the end of philosophy is the decisive moment of history’ (2022:109)

‘That a philosophical interrogation of conceptual meaning has become a real problem of historical development is a radical change in the philosophical horizon that will give life to a whole new way of questioning. This is now the problematic horizon of the whole of Marxism’ (2022:109)

Philosophical investigation is the same as a real problem. We can put this in the Kantian vocabulary (‘what is the real sense of critique?’ (2022:109)), the vocabulary of Feuerbach (‘how is man really and concretely responsible for his own essence?’ (2022:109)), or the Hegelian vocabulary (‘what is the historical sense of the end of philosophy?’ (2022:109))

We usually use the word “critique” in two ways. First, in the sense of a ‘Moral, political, psychological critique’ (2022:110), in which one contends that there is a nature, given as a postulate, which has been left behind and to which one must return. Second, in the sense of philosophical critique, whereby one tries to uncover the a priori conditions of possibility of connaissance, i.e., of access to being, given as a promise

These have not always been separate. Kant, at the basis of his philosophical critique, found it grounded in the question of man. As such, critique henceforth needed to be a reflection on man in order to be fulfilled. At the same time, since this critique involves questioning nature, nature cannot be the basis of critique. ‘It is therefore the man who is criticised that must be the basis of critique’ (2022:110). Critique is to be accomplished in a critique of man insofar as man is the ground of critique

The French Revolution saw a critique of institutions by means of which the city was found as possessing ‘the conditions of possibility of virtue, of morality, of equality’ (2022:111). In the failure of the Revolution, one found that this city must be one of citizens, not of property owners, and ‘So the completion and the fulfilment of the Revolution must begin at the level of a critique of man’ (2022:111)

It is in the resulting critical philosophy that the concerns of the eighteenth century connect with the features of German philosophy, and this is where Marx will begin. First, the theme that man has a concrete essence, which is to be a unity (in Sinnlichkeit) with the world and a community with others, briefly: ‘as sensuousness and as love: both as natural being and as spiritual community’ (2023:111). Second, that this concrete essence is hidden behind an abstract essence, whereby man’s being is considered a suprasensible essence (with religion) and a selfish essence (with desire), hence the alienated becomings. Hence, critique must be a critique of religion and a critique of desire. In religion: Jesus is a moment in the development of man, the end of which is God (says Strauss); the essence of God is to be the ‘essence of nature, as different from nature,’ and ‘the essence of man, as different from man’ (2022:112) (says Feuerbach); religion is a way of maintaining the forgetting of man’s essence (says Marx). In desire, man alters his own essence and makes nature as inhuman as possible: Feuerbach on relations between men and women; Marx on the same topic in his discussion of Feuerbach. Still, all this critique is critique of consciousness, which has three characteristics: ‘it is exercised from what it critiques’ (2022:112), meaning it eradicates religion by questioning religion; it liberates a pre-existing essence, it does not make a new one; it is ‘an exercise of consciousness upon itself’ (2022:113). Critique thus must be critique of religion, it is ‘both the postulate and the claim of an essence of man which, starting from the forgetting of the self, can be recalled to its original presence and restored to its natural rights’ (2022:113)

Critique is idealist, then, but it at minimum does appeal ‘to a notion which, when questioned in its foundation, will ensure the self-deprivation of critique and will constitute a problem-setting of philosophy’ (2022:113). Man’s essence can be alienated because he can (in imagination or desire) project himself outside himself, take on a face by which he does not recognise himself, and (in debasement and sacrifice) remove what he is for the benefit of something that he is not (sexuality or God)

Critique possesses, in itself, only the negative aspect of this, the concept of forgetting, it ‘does not possess this positive concept of the projection out of self and the presentation of self in the unrecognisable, disguised, and alien form of the other’ (2022:113). Critique only becomes positive critique insofar as it takes up the idea of alienation, which ‘is the critical deepening of finitude, the positive sense of finite consciousness’ (2022:114). Necessarily, then, the concept of alienation requires a movement into the realm of the real

‘The concept of alienation fulfils critique, transforming it into a critique of real man. But [it] goes beyond it, and challenges it: for only reality can critique reality, only material forces can fight against material forces’ (2022:114). Here is the transition from the bourgeois philosophy of individual freedoms to the proletarian philosophy of class liberation

In Hegel, alienation has four parts. First, it is the positivity of religion and law, and in this sense history is alienation ‘insofar as it is the absolute position of positivity’ (2022:114). Second, it is work, insofar as this is self-realisation in matter (the object) or in life (slavery), and in this sense all production is alienation. Third, it is consciousness (an illusion), when one confuses the subject and the object, ‘when life gives itself as matter or consciousness gives itself as life’ (2022:114). Fourth, it is the objectivity of any concept, since ‘the idea is objective only in the form of alienation’ (2022:115)

In Hegel’s practice, all these forms are commanded by the last one: alienation is possible (including in the case of objectivity) only because consciousness or the idea can alienate itself. Alienation can only be overcome by enunciating it in its truth, and this enunciation is Erinnerung

Erinnerung is: internalisation, the suppression of objectivity, and; that which, in history, is recollected and repeated, the same. This is to repeat in the internality of consciousness (which in this context has no history), that is, a phenomenology is ‘the destiny of the overcome spirit’ (2022:115)

In Marx, alienation takes on the reverse form. Whereas Hegel finds alienation as that which makes historical positivity possible, Marx considers history as that which accounts for alienation. At the same time, ‘this reversal is the very dissolution of the notion of alienation, its disappearance, at least apparently’ (2022:115)

In Marx, what is alienated is not an idea, nor an essence of man, but real man. But what can an alienation of real man mean without an idea of essence?

‘Alienation is the obscuring of economic relations, the constitution of a determinism that man cannot control’ (2022:116), achieved by labour, the process in which the producer is annihilated in the object of labour. The product will outlive the worker, the conditions of its production are the death of the worker, and labour only works to the profit of the other

‘Work as a divine and creative act, work as the presence of God in man, has become the death of man: it is man who is responsible for alienation. This is a crucial step: in Hegelian or neo-Hegelian philosophy, alienation is in God, in nature, in the object. Now it is in man. Alienation is no longer the fact that man escapes from himself into a world that is foreign to him. It is now the fact that man becomes a stranger to himself in and through man himself. His exile is hidden in his closest homeland’ (2022:116)

Where Feuerbach demands we return to interhuman essence, Marx finds alienation ‘in the very place where man feels most at home, among other men’ (2022:116)

For Marx, then, alienation is not the forgetting of the human essence, so what is it? It is characterised by: exchange, an abstraction; the commodity with its value and laws (objectification); the distinction between collective labour and individual ownership (individualisation and depersonalisation); surplus value. In sum, alienation is exploitation

‘Neither man nor labour as human activity is alienated. But only the products of labour and labour time. Alienation is only a conflict between product and time’ (2022:117)

Alienation, then, can no longer be ‘the milieu of philosophical reflection’ (2022:118). Where Hegel and Feuerbach thought of philosophy as the way out of alienation, Marx thinks of alienation as escaped by revolution. Is this the end of philosophy? If so, it would be as a stage in the realisation that the philosophical idea of alienation is the opposite of its reality, and that ‘the end of real alienation is the end of philosophy’ (2022:118), such that philosophy’s idea of alienation is a historical symptom of real alienation

Marxist philosophy is always a humanism, but humanism necessitates the idea of alienation which we have just seen Marxism reject. Marxism cannot be a philosophy, only the end of the bourgeois philosophy ‘which thinks that man and truth belong to each other, by the rights of a forgotten essence which it is the duty of philosophy to awaken and humanism to carry out’ (2022:119), it is ‘the discovery that man and truth belong to each other only in the form of freedom’ (2022:119)

D: The Anthropological Theme for Dilthey

Introduction

The development of anthropology causes the transcendental aspect of Kant’s critical questions to fade, leaving anthropology as a science of a specific essence of man, the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften; “the human sciences” is the phrase used in the English translations of Dilthey, but the French, including Foucault, use ‘sciences de l’esprit’), no longer as the basis of critique. The sciences of man have three areas of privileged application: understanding, will, and desire

Dilthey’s project is to repeat the Kantian critique, but this time in terms of the human sciences. They are forms of connaissance with which Kant did not grapple in his critiques. At the same time, we have learned that one ought not to base critique in the abstract. Further, we should not do what Kant does in utilising the ideas of ‘intuition and thought, matter and form’ (2022:121), distinctions which have no grounding after critique. Instead, Dilthey proposes to repeat the critical enterprise, but this time on the basis of principles derived from the scientific study of Geist

As such, ‘the repetition of the critical question about the human sciences was to be one and the same with the resumption of anthropological investigation as an analysis of [Geist]. And, to this extent, the answer to the anthropological question must naturally be the realisation and suppression of critique’ (2022:121)

Dilthey therefore sets out to find the region wherein the articulations and movement of the human sciences in general will become possible, ‘a region where the effective essence of man unfolds’ (2022:121). This region must occur at a level below that in which Geist is conceived of as object, since it is on this basis that such a conception is possible, and so it must also account for the conception of Geist as object. This region is that of Leben

Leben is not, strictly speaking, a concept, but a region where one finds foundation and the immediate, the absolute proximity of the original. As such, this philosophy will be concerned with explicating the Wirkliches (real). This Wirkliches will declare and formulate itself in concrete experience, not concepts. Experience as a whole, lived life, is to be the basis of philosophy, and the subject will not be an entity but the process of life

In the Reformation, spirituality is individualised and secularised. With enlightenment, the transcendent aspect of this is removed. In pantheism, the world is conceptualised in a way that fully comprehends its sense. With Kant, the subject is a creative process. With Schelling and Hegel, this creative life of the subject is linked to the pantheistic idea of world. As such, Dilthey sees his project as the culmination of the history of philosophy, which liberates the idea of Leben from empiricisms that presuppose abstract objectivity and from philosophies for which the subject has a schema

There are two sides to the analysis of Leben. First, outlining the constitutive movements of Leben. Second, describing ‘the genesis of the figures in which Geist is objectified’ (2022:124). These are one for Dilthey. With Feuerbach we saw an alienation of the return to the origin in a psychologism, and essence purified into ethics of alienation; with Dilthey we see the purification of essence as a psychological genesis of Weltanschauungen (worldviews) and the return to the original and immediate as the ethical task of history

Leben and man are essentially other, but, unlike Feuerbach, they have no means of penetrating one another, they are totally obscure. Dilthey is thus opposed to pantheisms (of representation or Gefühl), a rational Gestaltung (conception) of the world, and a Grund (foundation) that would be indifferent to the difference between nature and freedom. This is why we feel the fragility of life and existence in the experience of analysis, and why the starting point of any analysis of Leben must be arbitrary. Analysis of Leben will begin with an arbitrary point, a facticity, and expand infinitely towards totality, each expansion (a simultaneous deepening) resituating the starting point

For this experience of the foreignness of Leben to exist for us as an enigma, it must be based in a more original mode of belonging, which is revealed in the poet’s experience. In poetry, the Dasein of the individual is connected to life itself. First as the connection to fellow men (the mother in childhood, and history as a whole)

Second, as the totality of self and world, realised in Leben, which is the condition of possibility for all experiences both of self and of the world (so the world is neither product of self nor exists before self, which is why we always believe in the world without making a judgement); one experiences the self and the object in the same act, an act which is that of the drive meeting resistance in the external world, meaning ‘Leben will thus be the element in which the forces of desire and the obstacles of nature will play out. Life is, in its unity, the movement through which desire meets the world’ (2022:127)

Because of this very fact, Leben will be that in which the world immediately organises itself for us, which we understand. ‘Things and others’ will be for us ‘pressures and demands’ (2022:128), and Leben will be organised ‘according to spatial relations of distance and proximity, temporal relations of familiarity and strangeness, affective relations of Freundschaft [friendship] and Feindschaft [hostility]’ (2022:128, square brackets editor’s). The world is organised for us and understood by us. ‘Leben is the movement through which the world originally opens up to our Verstehen [understanding]’ (2022:128)

This Leben in which our understanding and desire meet the world contains the element of strangeness. This element is no longer the mere unfamiliarity of unknown forces, it is now ‘a threat within the very movement of life’, the threat of becoming (2022:128). The facts of birth, growth, and death are becomings, which we cannot understand: ‘hence the feeling of dread before the absolute fact of death’ (2022:129)

‘Here we find the starting point of the analysis of life: its facticity. We have thus proceeded without recourse to any transcendence, remaining at the very level of Leben and with our starting point in Leben’ (2022:129)

In this analysis, the unfolding of Leben, we needed to use the notions of Gefühl, Trieb, and Verstehen(feeling, drive, and understanding). Each one of these seems more fundamental than the other two in Dilthey’s work at different times; in actuality, ‘it is a question of the three dimensions of life, insofar as the Leben is also our world. The encounter in the form of desire, the opening of the Verstehen, and finally the test in the Gefühl of our finitude and the existence of others, constitute three original structures of Leben, through which it develops as what is most foreign to us, and yet most ours, through which it presents itself under the figure of the world, through which finally it designates itself as Geist’ (2022:129-130). In this sense, Leben is the transcendent ground from which a world can exist as a world

Dilthey’s mistake, however, was to also incorporate a psychological genesis of Weltanschauungenwhich used will, representation, and affectivity as the three characteristics of human nature

The return to Leben ‘answered a threefold question: How is it that there is a world open to me? How is it that I can be linked to the world in an immediate unity? How can I trace, in these landscapes, the paths of my desire, and go back down the paths of my familiarity?’ (2022:130). The first aspect of this is answered in the Verstehen, the second in the Gefühl, and the third in the Trieb. Fundamentally it is the question ‘how can I be related to the world in its truth?’ (2022:130), answered by Leben

This return, however, was supposed to be not only the basis of critique, but also the development of the critique of the human sciences, that is, ‘to show how man can become the object of a science, or at least the subject of objective connaissance’ (2022:130-131). Leben has only set out ‘the ground of experience in general’ (2022:131). Is it possible to find here, in this return to Leben, ‘the foundation of an objectivity?’ (2022:131)

Feuerbach’s tension was between a return to the origin and a purification of essence; Dilthey’s tension is between a return to the origin and the grounding of an objectivity

‘N.B. We can see how, in ‘anthropology’ as a point of realisation and suppression of critique, the space in which phenomenological reflection will develop its bearing surface takes shape: the problem of a return to the originary that is both the foundation of objectivity and the purification of essence. We understand why phenomenology can present itself as anti-anthropology and bring anthropology back to life under its feet’ (2022:131)

Feuerbach found a solution in the development of man as concrete essence, in which forgetting-abstraction-alienation can occur, but which also allowed for an ‘objectivity based on culture and love’ (2022:131). This posited the ambiguity from which he could only emerge with the concept of history

Dilthey will find his solution instead in an analysis of the movement of Geist that allows Geist to go from its origin to the objectification in which it can be understood by psychology or history. It will be a movement from objectification to objectivity. The question is whether there will be a tension between ‘the psychological forms of the Seelenleben [life of the soul] and the historical figures of the Weltleben[life of the world]’ (2022:132, square brackets editor’s); certainly there will be a temptation to slip into psychological analysis or historical genesis

The question of how objectivity is to be founded is linked ‘to the discovery of an original form of essence and to the immediate experience of Leben’ (2022:132)

As such, objectivity’s ground will have, as its form, ‘an explicitation of the unity and of the movement by which Leben diversifies itself’ (2022:132). Critique must connect all diverse forms of objectivity to Leben. Rather than a transcendental deduction, the forms of objectivity and their explanations will be made explicit, de-implicated

‘These forms of objectification will indeed have the value and scope of categories, but they will not be prior, independent, and a priori in relation to their content; they will be the very form of this content’ (2022:133). There are two kinds of these categories. The first, proper to logic, deal with the form of Denken, and so are valid for the entirety of Wirklichkeit. The second deal with the content of objects, meaning they differ between domains. These categories ‘are not forms that apply to the content of life, but a […] formation of the content of life’ (2022:133)

The problem of individuation is part of these categories from the beginning. These categories are ‘the forms in which individuality develops, or individual experience when it is fulfilled in its universal significations’ (2022:133)

As such, we cannot be led through the categories of Leben by a pure logic, only by a transcendental experience, in which the forms of Leben become explicit

Transcendental experience is distinct from internal experience in that, in transcendental experience, the outside world remains just as present. In transcendental experience, ‘individual phenomena make explicit their links to the whole and thus constitute the face of the objective universal’ (2022:134)

Transcendental experience is the form of Leben and the formulation of Geist. It has as a starting point the individual, not ‘in the spatial and biological sense, but the individual inflection of Leben in its totality: […] It is Leben as Erlebnis’ (2022:134)

Erlebnis is not an object for the person who experiences it; it is, instead, the being-there of the object, inseparable from that object, it is the object’s mode of being for me. It is not, therefore, a subjective tint over the object, ‘but that by which there are for us objects’ (2022:134). It is the sign that I belong to the world and that the world belongs to me

Erlebnis is a temporal unity, in the sense that it opens onto the past and the future, torn open by them, while remaining able to integrate them wholly (by memory and imagination, respectively). The unity of Erlebnis opens onto a field of presence

This field of presence owes its unity not to present values, nor to the past, nor to the future, but to Bedeutung, signification. It is Bedeutung that allows ‘opening onto the future to be at the same time integration, presentation, and recognition of the past’ (2022:135), in that Bedeutung makes the past into a condition of the future, and makes the future the goal of the past. ‘The linking of the Erleben[lived] in its actual and concrete reality is based on the category of Bedeutung. […] Bedeutung is contained in experiences as a constitutive moment of their linking’ (Dilthey, cited in Foucault, 2022:136, square brackets editor’s)

‘Erleben with all its significance is discovered to be the principle of unity of Leben itself. The explicitation of Erleben brings to light the basis of objectivity of Leben in its unity: this explicitation allows us to grasp what is the basis for conceiving the sequence of Leben as objective unity. We have the first category of the human sciences’ (2022:136)

Bedeutung makes a totality of experience possible, but this totality cannot be observed in itself and does not objectify itself. To think of the objectification of life outside Bedeutung is the error of naturalism; to try to find the unity of Leben in consciousness in Erleben is the error of psychologism. Explicating Erleben gives us the first category of Leben’s objectivity, but no more

There is a second form of objectivity of Leben, which is Ausdruck, expression: this expression is not separate from experience, they are immediately the same thing, but Ausdruck adds the ability for experience to express, ‘in the form of objectivity, the implicit totality of which experience is a part’ (2022:137). Thus, expression is the fulfilment of experience, bringing the unconscious to consciousness and articulating it in an objective form. Expression is lived experience insofar as it emerges as objectivity

Ausdruck has three types. First, the proposition, which can be understood without needing to understand the experience, and thus conforms to the norms of logical understanding, being either true or false. Second, there are actions, which can also be understood separately from experience but only insofar as one passes through an internal finality. These form a technical understanding, conforming to a goal. Third, there is Erlebnisausdruck, the expression of experience, the proper form of expression, either accurate or inaccurate. This last type has two forms. The minor form is practical. The major form is the work of art, which expresses a single experience, but as separate from its creator

Here, there is a new moment of objectification and a new type of objectivity, ‘from which an expression can be understood […] as a meaningful expression’ (2022:138), which is Geist

Geist is the category of the universal, since it allows one to comprehend the links between: experience and expression; moments of expression; acts of expression. Geist is also the form in which the ‘universal is objectified and expressed’ (2022:139), making it ‘both the universal element of expression and that in which the universal is expressed’ (2022:139). As such, Geist must be ‘the presence of the universal in each singular element of experience, in each individual act of expression’ (2022:139). Lastly, Geist is history, and here is where Dilthey’s work must complete its circle. Certainly, ‘the universal that constitutes the closest and most immediate homeland of lived experience is the universality of historical forms’ (2022:139). As such, a proposition is comprehensible only within a community of linguistic commonality, and so on, such ‘that history becomes the privileged medium of understanding, the supreme form of objectivity and the achieved figure of objectification’ (2022:139). Hence all of Dilthey’s claims that man can only be understood in history

‘We are now at the level of Dilthey’s classical problematic: intuition of the world, understanding, objectivity of the human sciences, philosophy of philosophy’ (2022:140)

Dilthey says that Verstehen is ‘the mode of elucidation of Leben and Geist’ (Dilthey, cited in Foucault, 2022:140). Having followed him this far, we can see what this means. First it is with Verstehen that the world for us opens within Leben. Second, we can follow Verstehen through objectification, as the ‘grasping of meaning’, the ‘structure of expression’, and ‘the elucidation of [Geist] in the element of history’ (2022:140). Third, Verstehen is ‘the form of intelligibility […] carried along in every moment of the objectification of Geist’ (2022:140)

This is why Verstehen is the self-explicitating movement of Geist, since it is understanding of others, self, expression, and history. It is also why Verstehen, as understanding of its own connection with experience, expression, and history, is philosophical method

This hermeneutics is, in a narrow sense, the art of reading the written word. In a broader sense, however, it is the ‘reading, from structures and expressive contents, of the totality of the movement by which Leben objectifies itself in Geist’ (2022:141). In this broad sense, hermeneutics outlines ‘the way in which Geist expresses itself beyond and through psychological modulations, in which it can be deciphered in the filigree of historical formulations’ (2022:141), hence the critiques of historical relativism and of psychologism

Verstehen, then, is: ‘the foundation of the possibility of connaître, and the rooting of the conditions of connaissance in original experience’ (2022:141); ‘the figure of intelligibility at the various levels of objectification: both the inner light of this objectification and the principle of intelligibility of the forms of objectivity’ (2022:141), and; ‘fundamentally the exercise of critique: it is its justification and its task. It is the act of philosophy: that by which man recognises in the discourse of history the sense of his most silent experience of his homeland’ (2022:141)

‘That is why in the historical world verstandene [understood], man feels at home’ (2022:141, square brackets editor’s)

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