Читать книгу The Early Foucault - Stuart Elden - Страница 14

Hyppolite was best known for his work on Hegel. He was the translator of the Phenomenology of Spirit, and wrote important works on that text, the Logic and the Philosophy of History.⁴⁸ Of a slightly earlier generation, Alexandre Kojève’s lectures had begun this French engagement.⁴⁹ The audience was extraordinary: Althusser, Raymond Aron, Bataille, Blanchot, André Breton, Koyré, Lacan, Henri Lefebvre, Emmanuel Lévinas, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and many others.⁵⁰ Hyppolite himself apparently avoided the lectures ‘for fear of being influenced’.⁵¹ As John Heckman puts it, ‘the course served as an indispensable preparation for the renewal of serious interest in Hegel after the Second World War. In large part it is fair to say that Kojève created the reading public for Hyppolite’s translation and commentary.’⁵² Hyppolite also wrote studies on Marx’s early, Hegelian, work,⁵³ and his essays across the history of western philosophy were collected into a wide-ranging collection two years after his death.⁵⁴ Foucault later recognizes how Wahl and Hyppolite together had made possible a French engagement with Hegel, albeit one that Foucault would attempt to free himself from with the aid of Nietzsche, Bataille and Blanchot (DE#281 IV, 84; EW III, 246).

In 1965 Hyppolite took part in a televised discussion with, among others, Canguilhem, Foucault, Paul Ricoeur, Dina Dreyfus and Alain Badiou.⁵⁵ He died in 1968, and it was his chair at the Collège de France to which Foucault was elected. There was a tribute session organized at the ENS on 19 January 1969, at which both Canguilhem and Foucault spoke.⁵⁶ Foucault suggests that Logique et existence is ‘one of the great books of our time’ (DE#67 I, 785), and pays specific attention to the course on the Phenomenology of Spirit which he attended – in which he says the students heard not only the voice of the professor, but also ‘something of the voice of Hegel, and perhaps even the voice of philosophy itself’ (DE#67 I, 779). Foucault underscores that Hyppolite was not just an historian of philosophy, but spoke of the ‘history of philosophical thought’ (DE#67 I, 780). The next year, Foucault pays fulsome tribute to Hyppolite in his Collège de France inaugural lecture in the History of Systems of Thought (OD 74–82/170–3), which seems to go beyond the standard honours to his predecessor demanded by the occasion. Finally, Foucault led the volume Hommage à Jean Hyppolite in 1971, to which he contributed his ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ essay, along with pieces by Canguilhem, Laplanche and Michel Serres.⁵⁷

Foucault’s diplôme d’études supérieures thesis (roughly equivalent to a Master’s degree by research) under the direction of Hyppolite was submitted in 1949. It was entitled ‘La Constitution d’un transcendantal dans la Phénoménologie de l’esprit de Hegel [The Constitution of a Transcendental in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit]’, but was long thought lost.⁵⁸ Even when Foucault’s papers were sold to the BNF in 2013 this thesis was not to be found: it appears that Foucault did not keep a copy. However, his nephew, Henri-Paul Fruchaud, found it in Foucault’s mother’s house. It is part of a collection of documents relating to the 1940s and 1950s which Fruchaud donated to the BNF, separate from the main Foucault Fonds. There are two typed copies of the thesis, along with fragments of Foucault’s manuscript and some typed summaries and plans, along with Annexes of references and a bibliography. One of the typescripts is missing several pages, but the other is almost complete and missing only pages 74 and 75. Unfortunately these are also missing from the other version.⁵⁹

Following a note on references and some ‘Preliminary Remarks’, the thesis is divided into three. The first and second parts are in three chapters; the third part in four. The structure is tied to three questions:

1 What are the limits of the field of phenomenological exploration, and to what criteria must the experience serving as a point of departure for reflection respond?

2 At what point does this regressive exploration end, and what is the limit of this transcendental domain in which experience is constituted?

3 What are the relations of this transcendental world with the actuality of the world of experience from which the reflection has unfolded, and for which it must account?60

Foucault suggests that the first requires an ‘objective examination of the work’; the second a ‘philosophical interpretation’; and the third a ‘critical reflection’.⁶¹ The parts are entitled ‘The Transcendental Field’, ‘The Transcendental Subject’ and ‘The Transcendental and History’. In each Foucault outlines the views of Hegel’s predecessors, notably Kant, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, before showing how Hegel resolves some of the problems.⁶² He also recognizes the historical development of Hegel’s writings, seeing the Phenomenology of 1807 as a break from Hegel’s earlier writings, and leading to the work of the Logic.⁶³ The parts are followed by an eleven-page conclusion, itself unpaginated and filed separately from the body of the text, with the Annexes and Bibliography found in other folders.

Foucault’s argument is that we should not see The Phenomenology of Spirit as an introduction to the Hegelian system or its first part, but rather as an assessment of how a ‘system as the totality of knowledge [savoir]’ could be conceived. Here Foucault is breaking with some of the previous commentators, such as Hyppolite who has seen it as an introduction to the Logic, or Wahl, who had conceptualized it as a noumenology,⁶⁴ as well as Hegel’s own description of it as ‘System of Science First Part’ in its original title. Foucault suggests it has both a negative, critical examination of previous failures to achieve this, and a positive ‘analysis of moments which constitute the possibility of absolute knowledge’. Essentially, this totality of knowledge ‘is a transcendental “milieu” in which the constituent subject is the ego or self [le moi], and the constitutive structure, the concept. The transcendental unity is a “I know [Je sais]”.’⁶⁵ Foucault sees the transcendental subject in contrast to Kant’s ‘I think’ and Descartes’s ‘I am’, itself of course founded on the cogito.⁶⁶ Thought in itself does not found knowledge, but the positive role of the Phenomenology is that it ‘reveals not knowledge itself, but the “element”, the milieu of knowledge [savoir]’.⁶⁷

In Foucault’s presentation, the dialectical basis to Hegel’s method of transcendental investigation consists of two alternating principles. One is a regressive procedure of going from the complex [composé] to the simple; the other is a progressive procedure going from the simple to the complex. The first step is a way of understanding ‘the unity of the transcendental subject in absolute knowledge’; the second moves from the naked perception of the object to the ‘consciousness of the world’. It is the ‘constant correlation of these two steps that makes the complex unity of the phenomenological method’.⁶⁸ History is both an element in the transcendental world, but also something which ‘must be overcome [dépassé] by a more fundamental element’.⁶⁹

Foucault argues that we should interrogate Hegel on his own ground, asking him only questions that he asked himself, a process of immanent engagement with his thought.⁷⁰ He questions how:

Kant’s philosophy of the transcendental became, in history, a category of thought, how, put otherwise, historicity constituted by the Kantian transcendental became a constituent historicity in later philosophy. When we pass from Kant, inventor of the transcendental, to his successors, we do not pass from one moment of history to another, we pass from a world of effective historical experiences to a possible world of historical experiences.⁷¹

Essentially we must ask Hegel how the ‘experience of a fact’ relates to a category.⁷² As Foucault outlines, ‘far from being a tautology, the fundamental definition of knowledge by the “I know” is the only means of giving a reality and a transcendental sense to the “I think”’ of Kant’.⁷³

The definition of the transcendental ego [Moi] comprises three moments: the first consists in the substitution of a ‘I know’ for ‘I think’; the second discovers that knowledge is at the same time knowledge and constitution of a world of experiences; finally, this constitutive principle is not an anonymous substance, it is an ‘I’ [moi] that is only ever a relation to itself.⁷⁴

Each of these moments is, for Hegel, ‘dialectically defined’ in relation to earlier attempts to ‘discover the constitutive principle of experience’, in relation notably to Kant and Fichte. Foucault underscores that Hegel does not dissociate these three moments, and that the Phenomenology works on them at different levels. This leads Foucault to ‘the question of the status of philosophy in relation to the transcendental’, the theme of the longest part of his thesis.⁷⁵ Foucault contends that the whole of the Phenomenology demonstrates Hegel’s point of the system of ethical life [Sittlichkeit] that language is the ‘instrument of reason’.⁷⁶

All this means that Foucault discusses the way in which Hegel conceptualizes history, which he suggests is connected to another sense of time, that of the ‘time of intuition, the immediate presence of a concept’. For Hegel, the transcendental subject is the consciousness that knows [connaît] it, ‘already present in all experiences’.⁷⁷ Foucault sees Hegel’s work as a fundamental challenge to the ‘empty history of Kant, and the blind history of Herder’.⁷⁸ In relation to historical matter it makes it temporal; in ‘relation to historical knowledge it is what prevents history from being seen as external to the becoming that it thinks’.⁷⁹ Therefore, ‘history can be defined as the totality of experience’.⁸⁰

The problem of the thesis is therefore to examine the relation between the historical and the transcendental, of the conditions necessary for there to be an historical experience. In this sense, the conditions must already be established, even though they are historically constituted: a circular problem.⁸¹ Foucault notes that Hegel transforms an historical question into a philosophical problem.⁸² He suggests that the crucial issue for Hegel is the contrast between a cyclical history, in which the totality is enclosed, and the possibility of escaping from history, ‘because there is no history without a consciousness that thinks it’, and ‘because history, for this consciousness, has a signification which is not historical: it is religion’.⁸³

The resolution for this, Foucault argues, is the ‘new phenomenological dimension’, that of ‘being-for-us [être-pour-nous]’, which is not so much the unity of ‘being-in-itself’ and ‘being-for-itself’ as the consciousness of the philosopher.⁸⁴ The idea of the truth in itself is problematic, insufficient, because it does not have a relation to a conscience, and because, ‘thought by the philosopher, the in-itself is no longer in-itself’. ‘Being-for-us’ avoids this problem, because it ‘is a mediation and makes the in-itself effective’; and ‘far from disappearing at the level of absolute knowledge, the for-us is what is realized in its totality at the level of absolute knowledge’.⁸⁵ Finally, Foucault explores how being-for-us and being in history are related. For Descartes, Kant and Fichte, in different ways, the thinker, the object and truth are intertwined. With Hegel, the philosopher is able to transcend this, because there is a transcendental subject, absolute knowledge, which constitutes history, and with which they can identify.⁸⁶

Foucault devotes some space in his final chapter to the young Marx’s critique of Hegel,⁸⁷ but it is in the conclusion that the full stakes of his engagement become clear.⁸⁸ It reiterates some general themes, and contextualizes the writing of the work in 1806 as a response to Kant and Fichte.⁸⁹ This context is entirely intellectual: Foucault does not mention the famous connection to the Battle of Jena and Napoleon’s entry into the town in October 1806, just as Hegel was completing the work.⁹⁰ Foucault suggests that the Phenomenology is ‘neither preface nor part of the Hegelian system’; but that it is ‘the search for what makes possible the totality of a system of thought that wants to present itself as a science. It is the process that will allow a thought to be systematic without contradiction.’⁹¹ Indeed, he claims that the work as a whole ‘can be interpreted as a phenomenology of philosophical consciousness, as a description of this step towards integral knowledge, if at least we can accept the interpretation of absolute knowledge that we have attempted’.⁹²

A brief discussion of Marx, and a contrast of Hegel with Husserl’s Ideas in the conclusion,⁹³ are the extent of his explicit engagement with the literature after Hegel, though Foucault is clearly indebted to Hyppolite’s interpretation. The debates with which Hegel was involved are outlined, but for the most part this is an internal examination of Hegel’s work, largely but not exclusively through the Phenomenology. Foucault also makes reference to other works by Hegel including the Logic, Elements of the Philosophy of Right and the Encyclopaedia; his lecture courses;⁹⁴ and the earlier writings which predate the Phenomenology, including theological texts from Hegel’s years in Berne and Frankfurt and writings from the Jena period.⁹⁵ Except for Hyppolite’s translation of the Phenomenology, Foucault usually makes reference to the Leipzig edition of the Sämtliche Werke, with some other references for early works.⁹⁶ Secondary literature draws on a wide range in French, German and English, notably including works by Hyppolite and Wahl,⁹⁷ but also studies by Georg Lukács, Karl Löwith and Benedetto Croce.⁹⁸ For phenomenology beyond Hegel himself, Foucault references Husserl’s Logical Investigations, Cartesian Meditations, and Experience and Judgment, as well as articles by Eugen Fink, Lévinas and Sartre.⁹⁹ The reading is certainly extensive, though the referencing, at least in the draft preserved in the files, is somewhat slapdash. References are frequently incomplete or wrong; Kierkegaard’s name is misspelt as Kierkegaared, Kojève as Kogève, Husserl’s Erfahrung und Urteil as Erpatirung und Urteil, and even, astonishingly, his thesis director twice misspelt as ‘Hippolite’. These errors indicate that another hand was responsible for the typing of the text, and had to contend with Foucault’s often difficult handwriting.

It is an apprentice work, certainly, and one that bears strong marks of its supervisor. Among other things it is notable that Foucault does not discuss the master/slave dialectic, central to Kojève’s reading of the text, which was to become so influential following him. It is an important moment in Foucault’s intellectual development, and an astonishing piece of work for someone who was only twenty-two when it was completed in June 1949.¹⁰⁰ While Foucault does not pursue the type of approach here in subsequent work, except perhaps the introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, there are some similarities to topics of later interest. In particular, the (contingent) nature of the transcendental and its conditions of possibility are here always historical, something with which Foucault will continue to be concerned in later work. Equally, the stress on the question of knowledge would be central to his work of the 1960s, culminating in The Archaeology of Knowledge, and continues into his work of the 1970s with the notion of power-knowledge. The reading undertaken finds its most immediate payoff in the lecture courses he would give in Paris and Lille in the first half of the 1950s, discussed in Chapter 2. This is especially so for the work on philosophical anthropology, which engages with German thought in detail, but also for his interest in the development of phenomenology in Husserl. However, the text is also notable for the complete absence of reference to Heidegger and Nietzsche, two key figures for his later intellectual development (see Chapter 5).¹⁰¹