Читать книгу The Early Foucault - Stuart Elden - Страница 13

Beaufret taught widely across the history of philosophy. He is best known as the recipient of Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, sent in response to questions Beaufret posed in 1946.⁵ He is the author of the four-volume Dialogues avec Heidegger,⁶ and known for his long introduction and translation of Parmenides’ poem, often known as ‘On Nature’.⁷ However, Beaufret apparently never taught a course on Heidegger, thinking his thought could not be summarized.⁸ Instead his teaching covered Plato and Aristotle; Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, Baruch Spinoza; Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Husserl.⁹ Heidegger’s thought does influence much of Beaufret’s teaching: with the exception of Spinoza, these figures were the focus of most of Heidegger’s own teaching career. Foucault kept notes on what appear to be lectures by Beaufret on Kant and Spinoza.¹⁰ Beaufret eventually taught a short course on Heidegger’s Being and Time at a lycée in 1972.¹¹ Beaufret fought for France in the war, escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp, and joined the resistance. He has been criticized for his uncritical attitude to Heidegger’s Nazi past and for his own alleged anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.¹²

Desanti was a philosopher of mathematics, a student of Jean Cavaillès, but also a phenomenologist, Spinoza scholar and a member of the PCF until 1956.¹³ When Jacques Derrida finally submitted his Doctorat d’État in 1980, based on publications, it was directed by Desanti. Derrida’s original supervisor had been Hyppolite, but that thesis was never completed.¹⁴ Gouhier mainly worked on French philosophy between Descartes and Bergson, and it seems Foucault attended lectures by him on both.¹⁵ Gouhier was also an authority on the theatre, and also helped to edit works by Maine de Biran, Auguste Comte and Henri Bergson’s lectures.¹⁶ He was the supervisor of Pierre Bourdieu’s dissertation on Leibniz, a translation and commentary on the Animadversiones in partem generalem Principiorum cartesianorum.¹⁷ In 1978 Gouhier would invite Foucault to a lecture to the Société française de philosophie only published after Foucault’s death, known as ‘What is Critique?’¹⁸

These figures gave Foucault a broad education in philosophy, but central to his subsequent development was Wahl, a wide-ranging philosopher and historian of philosophy, who worked especially on Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger. He wrote a key work for the French engagement with Hegel in 1929 and a major, 750-page study of Kierkegaard in 1938, one of the first French engagements with existentialism.¹⁹ His Human Existence and Transcendence was published in 1944 but, unlike Jean-Paul Sartre’s work from the previous year, has only recently been translated.²⁰ Wahl was also significant in terms of his engagement with Anglophone work, a textbook on French philosophy, and a general introduction on Philosophies of Existence.²¹ Wahl ran the Collège philosophique at which Derrida presented ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ in 1963; and would invite Foucault to give the ‘What is an Author?’ lecture to the Société française de philosophie in 1969.²²

Crucially for Foucault, Wahl taught on Heidegger from the mid 1940s through the 1950s. Derrida recalls that Heidegger was very much a presence at the ENS due to Beaufret and Hyppolite.²³ But Wahl’s Sorbonne courses did much more. They were based on both on his reading of published texts, but also his knowledge of Heidegger’s courses of the 1920s and 1930s.²⁴ Despite some reports, Wahl did not attend lectures himself, noting in a letter to Heidegger of December 1937 that he ‘would love to meet with you one day. But all sorts of obstacles stand in the way at present.’²⁵ Foremost among those obstacles was his Jewish heritage, which meant he left Europe during the war. But Wahl certainly had access to notes from Heidegger’s courses.

Wahl’s introductory course from January to June 1946 discussed Being and Time, but also Heidegger’s work on Kant and his discussion of truth, which as Jean Montenot notes closely parallels Heidegger’s own 1928–9 course at the University of Freiburg Einleitung in die Philosophie [Introduction to Philosophy] (GA27).²⁶ Indeed, it follows Heidegger to such a remarkable degree that as Dominique Janicaud says, it is not so much ‘a course on Heidegger, but a commentary on a course by Heidegger’.²⁷ It was delivered in the academic year before Foucault began University studies, but Defert says that Foucault attended what sounds like a similar course from October 1946.²⁸ A very young Kostas Axelos, newly arrived from Greece, was there for the earlier course, and recalls that Wahl ‘did not read a text written in advance, and only consulted the notes he had with him very occasionally’.²⁹ It seems likely that Foucault attended Wahl’s 1950 course L’Idée d’être chez Heidegger, and possibly the December 1951 to March 1952 course La Pensée de Heidegger et la Poésie de Hölderlin.³⁰

While the dominant French reading of Heidegger in the late 1940s and early 1950s focused on the texts available in translation, and tended to read him through Sartrean and Kierkegaardian lenses,³¹ Wahl was able to provide a much richer interpretation. These courses make extensive use of Heidegger’s writings after Being and Time, with a special focus on the collection Holzwege. Holzwege was published in 1950 and included texts from 1936–46, notably one on Nietzsche. Wahl also discusses the ‘Letter on Humanism’, and there is a stress on the development of Heidegger’s thought.³² He also draws on secondary literature, including Walter Biemel’s study of the world, and makes extensive use of an article by Henri Birault, then forthcoming in Revue de métaphysique et de morale, a journal Wahl edited.³³ Foucault took notes on Biemel’s study, which also includes discussion of unpublished material.³⁴

Two further courses, on the history of metaphysics and philosophy of existence were published in 1951.³⁵ The first of these has a focus on Heidegger’s short book that contained ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’ and the ‘Letter on Humanism’; along with Holzwege. Wahl immediately translates Heidegger’s brief description of what a Holzwege is – a wood path, but also a lost path.³⁶ Wahl also discusses Heidegger’s 1924–5 course on Plato’s Sophist and the first lecture course on Nietzsche from 1936–7 on The Will to Power as Art, unpublished until 1992 and 1961, respectively.³⁷ Foucault either attended this course or had access to its notes.³⁸ Wahl’s subsequent courses included two at the Sorbonne published together as Traité de Métaphysique, though these do not discuss Heidegger as much.³⁹ One notable later course by Wahl was on Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger’s 1935–6 lecture course, though not published in German until 1953.⁴⁰ Wahl’s final course on Heidegger was Mots, mythes et réalité dans la philosophie de Heidegger, published in 1961.⁴¹

Wahl’s access to unpublished material is significant. Beaufret recalls that Alexandre Koyré took a copy of a Heidegger course to France in 1929.⁴² From Beaufret’s recollection of a passage in the manuscript, in which Heidegger compared Dasein to Leibniz’s monad, this is likely the same course Wahl mentions in his 1947 book Petite histoire de l’existentialisme, in which he too discusses such a passage.⁴³ Although Beaufret’s recollection is not precise, it is likely they mean the summer 1928 course, immediately preceding the Einleitung, published in German in 1978 and translated as The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. This course is a detailed engagement with Leibniz, and it does have a passage that matches their recollection.⁴⁴

It seems highly likely that Koyré brought more than one course to Paris from his time in Germany in 1928 and 1929.⁴⁵ While Koyré is best known in English for his works in the history of science, including From the Closed World to the Open Universe and The Astronomical Revolution, he was also a significant thinker of the history of philosophy.⁴⁶ Koyré had long been an important figure in the introduction of Heidegger’s ideas to France. Koyré and Wahl knew each other well, and Koyré was instrumental in getting Wahl to the United States in 1942, probably saving his life.⁴⁷ After the war Wahl clearly had access to other unpublished courses by Heidegger, including the one on Nietzsche on which he lectured. Student transcripts circulated and Foucault clearly had access to them too. Foucault’s engagement with Heidegger will be fully discussed in Chapter 5.