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The World of Freedom
Heidegger, Foucault, and the Politics of Historical Ontology
By Robert Nichols STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9271-4
CHAPTER 1
OVERVIEW OF THE PROBLEMATIC
No idea is so generally recognized as indefinite, ambiguous, and open to the greatest misconceptions (to which it therefore actually falls a victim) as the Idea of Liberty.... When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength. G. W. F. Hegel
ALTHOUGH THE CONCEPT OF FREEDOM is nearly universally praised, it is also highly abstract and thus deeply contested. The combination of these factors has given the term tremendous mobilizing force for competing political projects. Numerous critics and commentators of the French Revolution noted this (including Burke and Kant), but it was perhaps not until Hegel that it was given a full philosophical analysis. As the passage above attests, Hegel understood well that the idea of freedom was at once vague, powerful, and necessary. He also recognized that modern philosophy is thus burdened by the demands of freedom: the demand not only of its articulation but its realization. Unlike Classical thought, for instance, in which philosophy must first and foremost meet the demands of truth, modernity has imposed the additional expectation that thought be liberating. In a recent polemic, Peter Sloterdijk bemoans this historical transition, lamenting that "'knowledge is power.' This is the sentence that dug the grave of philosophy in the nineteenth century.... This sentence brings to an end the tradition of a knowledge that, as its name indicates, was an erotic theory—the love of truth and the truth through love (Liebeswahrheit).... Those who utter the sentence reveal the truth. However, with the utterance they want to achieve more than truth: They want to intervene in the game of power." Setting aside Sloterdijk's longing for a prelapsarian philosophical love affair with truth unsullied by the problem of power, perhaps we can invert this lament, turn it into a positive and future-oriented impulse. Can we read our desire to "achieve more than truth" as something other than a closure, as perhaps even an opening to new horizons?
If philosophic activity can no longer be confined to the rather solitary pursuit of truth, a modern focus on freedom is related to a certain resocialization of thought as well. Hence, increased preoccupation with freedom has been attended by a host of attacks upon what might be termed the philosophy of the constituting subject. A movement is observable in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, then, not only toward questions of freedom, but also away from an understanding of freedom as a property of the subject and more as a practice or a relationship (something one does rather than has). Once thought to designate the status of a small social and political elite, distinguishing them from the bulk of humanity who did not enjoy such standing (e.g., women, slaves, foreigners), the language of freedom was for many centuries necessarily stratified and nonreciprocal. Largely as a result of the upheavals of the nineteenth century, it is now possible, even commonsensical, for us to think of freedom as entailing a certain reciprocity and egalitarianism. To invoke perhaps the most famous and historically powerful iteration of this, unlike our predecessors, we can speak of freedom as an "association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." Increasingly, then, the freedom we talk about is a situation brought about through an ongoing practical relationship with the world and others. It is not something to be found, but rather something to be created and maintained with others.
Along with this shift in the political idiom of freedom has come a parallel transformation in metaphysical conceptions. One of the main ways in which this was most manifest in the twentieth century was through a turn to intersubjectivity. Instead of locating questions of freedom in the search for transcendental properties of the subject (i.e., consciousness, the categories of intuition, and the like), philosophers of intersubjectivity have sought to ground emancipatory praxis in the discursively mediated interaction between subjects. Such theories offer the insight that the identity and constitution of the subject is not determined a priori but rather is formed through intersubjective reciprocity between agents, an insight often traced back to Hegel. As such, the move to intersubjectivity can be read as a contribution to both of the two general trajectories set out: it ties the question of truth to the question of freedom, but does so in a manner that circumvents problems associated with a philosophy of consciousness.
A recent, influential contribution to this line of inquiry is the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas. Undoubtedly, Habermas's oeuvre represents one of the most ambitious and systematic attempts to overcome the philosophy of the constituting subject through recourse to a theory of communicative rationality that locates the transcendental condition for critique, not in consciousness, but in intersubjective discursive activity. However, underlying much of the discussion to follow is a concern that, despite Habermas's important insights, no theory of intersubjective communicative rationality can bypass the disclosing function of the pre-reflective activities by which a "world" of intelligible entities (including the very "subjects" who may engage in a discourse ethics) come into view in the first place. In other words, the field of possible subjects with which one may engage is not, in the first instance, discovered discursively-intersubjectively but rather practically-holistically (i.e., practice is not reducible to language).
While theories of intersubjectivity have garnered a great deal of attention with respect to their considerable contributions to post-Kantian practical philosophy, there is another alternative. The possibility that an ontological inquiry might provide another route beyond the philosophy of the constituting subject (and even an alternative to the philosophy of intersubjectivity) has been widely noted. Even as trenchant a critic of Heidegger as Habermas has praised the way in which Heidegger's "postmetaphysical historicizing" advances the "overcoming of the philosophy of subjectivity.... From today's standpoint, Heidegger's new beginning still presents probably the most profound turning point in German philosophy since Hegel." However, despite the wide recognition that Heidegger's work has gained in terms of challenging the philosophy of subjectivity, the implications of this remain underdeveloped for practical philosophy. Hence, the questions posed here: To what extent might the movement of freedom in post-Kantian political philosophy be recast in ontological terms? What difference might this make to the range of practical vocabularies available to us, currently preoccupied as they are with issues of intersubjectivity? Two thinkers who are indispensable for such an inquiry are Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault.
The choice to draw upon Heidegger in recasting freedom in ontological terms is rather straightforward. Heidegger is known not only for his insistence on ontology as the central preoccupation of philosophy, but also on the centrality of freedom to this form of analysis. Despite this insistence, and in contradistinction to the wealth of literature on freedom and transcendental subjectivity, or freedom and intersubjectivity, Heidegger's ontological thesis has not been fully explored in relation to the question of freedom. To date, no monograph devotes itself singularly to addressing the question: what did Heidegger understand by the term "freedom"? Or, more generally: what are the implications for thinking about questions of freedom after Heidegger's formulation of ontology? In fact, secondary literature on Heidegger and freedom is relatively hard to come by in either philosophy generally or political theory more specifically. This lack of sustained reflection is surprising and requires rectification.
Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault to investigate this topic is a considerably less obvious move. Although Foucault did speak of his work as a "historical ontology" and of freedom as a kind of "ontological ground," nowhere in his writings does he devote himself to a sustained, straightforward discussion of what ontology means to him. And yet, a thinker's silence on a topic does not entail its absence as a structuring field. Animating the project of reading Foucault ontologically then is a conviction that—despite his occasional protestations—he cannot avoid such questions altogether. As Johanna Oksala puts this point, "If Foucault's thought does not contribute anything to ontological questioning, then neither does it ultimately contribute anything significant to political philosophy." Since virtually the entire second half of this book is devoted to demonstrating the centrality of ontological considerations to Foucault's analysis of freedom, I will not rehearse the point here. Instead, I will merely direct readers to the bulk of the text as a defense of the importance of putting these two into direct conversation concerning this topic.
What is clear is that Heidegger and Foucault stand out as two of the most important and influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Each has spawned volumes of secondary literature and sparked fierce, polarizing debates, particularly as regards the relationship between philosophy and politics. And yet, to date there exists almost no work that presents a systematic and comprehensive engagement of the two in relation to one another. This book seeks to address this lacuna, but only indirectly. A different tack would focus on textual traces and personal connections. This kind of inquiry would no doubt place emphasis on Foucault's declaration at the end of his life that Heidegger was, for him, "the essential philosopher," one who determined his "entire philosophical development" (FL, 470; DE2, 1521–22). Taking up this (by no means self-evident) declaration as a textual and biographical problem is a legitimate and worthwhile project no doubt. However, this is not my primary interest or concern here. Instead, in a more general and tangential way, this book demonstrates that it is both interesting and important to read Heidegger and Foucault alongside and in relation to one another, particularly if we are to understand properly the shape of twentieth century continental thought. These two thinkers form the poles between which are stretched a great arc traversing twentieth-century European philosophy, beginning with fundamental ontology and ending in genealogical critique and an ethics of the "care of the self." One aim here is to convince that these two poles are, in fact, connected. For even if we are not entirely convinced by the answers these two specific thinkers offer, the questions they wrestled with remain unavoidable.
Despite this conceptual focus, however, in the pursuit of such theoretical questions, one cannot help but comment on the biographical details of how Foucault engaged with Heidegger. I return briefly to this question below (1.2) in order to situate the discussion that follows within the context of this secondary, exegetical problem. Before proceeding to this, however, a more detailed sketch of the theoretical problematic is required.
1.1. ONTOLOGY AND SITUATED FREEDOM
In the study that follows I attempt to trace how Heidegger and Foucault develop their respective analyses of freedom in relation to questions of ontology. Engaging with these two thinkers, I argue, allows us to develop an analysis of freedom understood not in terms of a property of the subject, nor as an intersubjective activity, but as a mode of Being-in-the-world. More specifically, I argue that this kind of relationship and stylized mode of being seeks to disclose the mutual interrelatedness of (1) the acquisition of knowledge; (2) the appearance of a domain of entities about which knowledge claims can be made; and (3) the ethical transformation of the subject of knowledge. One discloses this interrelatedness through a working out of the possibilities projected within the worldly activities of disclosure that make a horizon of intelligibility possible and thus are the field on which self-recognition and subject-formation takes place. To be in a "free" relationship to this field or clearing is not, for Heidegger and Foucault, to detach oneself from it through an act of cognitive reflection. Rather, it is to cultivate a certain ethical attitude of awareness within the activities of disclosure that constitute the ontological ground of the field itself. It is, in a word, to take care of the field and, through this, of oneself.
Of course, the notion that the ethical transformation of the self in and through its worldly activities is linked to the acquisition of knowledge about the world did not begin with Heidegger and Foucault. Nor is it unique to them. In fact, as both authors suggest, their formulation of the question in this manner has antecedents in the nineteenth century. Hegel, Stirner, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche in particular might all be read with an eye to elucidating these connections. Given this longer heritage I have, at times, employed Charles Taylor's terminology of "situated freedom" to describe the formation developed here. I borrow the term from Taylor not only because it evokes a historical link back to Hegel (through Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in particular), but also because for Taylor, situated freedom denoted a position between the largely negative notion of freedom as self-dependence and the positive notions of freedom centered around the expression of one's "true" self. As elaborated upon later in this work, the move to an ontological analysis of selfhood-in-action is an attempt to displace the aspiration to both autonomy and expressivism evoked by the prevailing language of positive versus negative liberty. Instead, in Taylor's words, "What is common to all the varied notions of situated freedom is that they see free activity as grounded in the acceptance of our defining situation. The struggle to be free ... is powered by an affirmation of this defining situation as ours." The notion of acceptance points to a second theme: finitude. For Heidegger and Foucault, the acceptance of finitude —in the sense of acknowledging one's factical limitations in a particular worldly condition and the fact that absolute knowledge of self and world is not, even in principle, possible—does not entail the end of freedom, but rather its beginning, insofar as this acknowledgment provides the starting point for an ethical transformation of one's mode or style of being within these conditions. In concluding chapters, I will describe and defend this transformation as a spiritual one.
The reference above to autonomy and expressivism speaks to the need to articulate what we mean by situated freedom in relation to its historical alternatives. To better arrange the field on which this discussion takes place, it is helpful therefore to sketch some alternative discourses of freedom against which Heidegger and Foucault are working.
At the outset of this chapter, I mentioned that the discussion of freedom in Heidegger and Foucault is very much set against a larger backdrop of the philosophy of the constituting subject. This philosophical backdrop owes much to Descartes and Kant in particular, about whom we will have more to say in later chapters. For now, however, it is important to note the interrelationship between a certain conception of transcendental subjectivity and a corresponding understanding of freedom as autonomy, developed most fully and most influentially by Kant. In the brief outline that follows, I draw most extensively upon Kant, not because he is the exclusive contributor to the philosophical traditions I am attempting to sketch, but because Kant remains the single most important figure in relation to whom Heidegger and Foucault position their respective work on freedom.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The World of Freedom by Robert Nichols. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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