A critical ontology of ourselves: The Kantian foundations of Michel Foucault\u27s philosophy

In his final writings Michel Foucault surprises in saying that his “critical ontology of ourselves” extends the tradition of critical philosophy inaugurated by Immanuel Kant. He had previously described his project as a “critique of the subject,” which purports to demolish the Kantian conception of the human being as capable of autonomous thought and conduct. Despite the obvious tensions between these descriptions, the scholarship continually interprets Foucault\u27s later turn to Kant according to his critique of the subject. The three essays of this dissertation challenge the efficacy of this interpretative strategy on textual and philosophical grounds. My thesis is that Foucault\u27s turn to Kant is indicative of a break in the former\u27s philosophical views, and therefore his earlier views must be proportioned to his more mature, and distinctively Kantian, philosophy. Chapter One opens with the argument that Foucault\u27s critique of the subject is incompatible his later self-inscription in the critical tradition, as it cannot accommodate a conception of autonomy. I then provide significant evidence that Foucault renounces his critique of the subject in order to accommodate autonomy. Not coincidentally, this renunciation occurs when Foucault begins to investigate Kant\u27s reflections on enlightenment. Drawing on Foucault\u27s investigations of Kant and the former\u27s late work on truth-telling, I defend a moderate account of Foucaultian critique that satisfactorily avoids the weaknesses and problems often attributed to his critical project by critics. Chapter Two argues that Béatrice Han\u27s and Amy Allen\u27s recent interpretations of Foucault\u27s alleged critique of Kant are fundamentally misguided. After elucidating the Kantian character of Foucault\u27s analysis of modern philosophy in The Order of Things, I argue that Han and Allen confuse Foucault\u27s critique of modern philosophical anthropology for a critique of Kant. They fail to notice his distinction between the formal (transcendental) subject from the subject conceived as the essential self. This leads to their failure to notice that Foucault uses Kant\u27s critique of metaphysics, notably the paralogisms of reason, to isolate the mistake of modern “anthropologism”. Finally, I contend that these facts show that Foucault\u27s critique of the subject is best understood as furthering a Kantian skepticism about possible knowledge of human nature, which fits nicely with the account of critique defended in Chapter One. Chapter Three focuses on the philosophy that informs Foucault\u27s historical methodologies. Following Colin Koopman I argue that phenomenological interpretations fail to capture Foucault\u27s mature articulations of his views. However, I challenge Koopman\u27s interpretation on the grounds that it fails to account for the transcendental language in which Foucault casts his methods. I resolve this impasse by showing that Foucault draws significantly on the conceptual architecture of Kant\u27s transcendental inquiry. Like Kant, Foucault sees a condition of experience as a rule that both enables and constrains, but uniquely accounts for these rules as social norms. Insofar as an analytic accounts for the rules that comprise the conditions of experience, Foucault\u27s methods comprise an historical analytic of experience or “historical ontology”