What is Enlightenment?

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What is Enlightenment?

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1vy0123
Editado: Abr 22, 2013, 12:30 am

In Beyond Enlightenment at the Introduction of editor David Couzen Hoy's Foucault: A Critical Reader there is referenced Kant's essay on ‘What is Enlightenment?’ and Foucault's effort on an essay also on ‘What is Enlightenment?’ .

What, where is the current thinking in answer to the question?

- also -

Adorno, Horkeheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment

~ and seperately in ~

p. 28
The interview is a French art form used to present work in progress which is destined, at first, for limited circulation, and which is couched in terms suitable for discussion among one specific audience.
p. 30
Savoir is not knowledge in the sense of a bunch of solid propositions. This ‘depth’ knowledge is more like a postulated set of rules that determine what kinds of sentences are going to count as true or false in some domain.
p. 32
‘Man’ is two-faced, knower and object of knowledge. He was formally announced when Kant one year put a new question into his annual Logic lectures: ‘What is Man?’
p. 42
One might simply take Foucault to be saying, in the manner of Wittgenstein, that we should remind ourselves of something we already know quite well: namely, that the way people talk can ‘create objects’, in the sense that there are lots of things which wouldn't exist unless people had come to talk in certain ways.
p. 67
We need men and women who tell us when state power is corrupted or systematically misused, who cry out that something is rotten, and who reiterate the regulative principles with which we might set things right.
p. 89
The power of the audience over the star craving approval is utterly incommensurable with the power of the elected minister, and that in turn with the power of the guru, and so on. Power can only be understood within a context; and this is the obverse of the point that the contexts can only in turn be understood in relation to the kind of power which constitutes them (Foucault's thesis).
p. 98
From certain indications, this would seem to be based, as one would expect, on a rejection of the whole idea that we have a deep self or nature which we have to decipher. Foucault thinks that Christianity introduced this false turn into Western culture. Where the ancient ‘care of the self’ was concerned with self-making and self-mastery, Christian spirituality was preoccupied rather with purity and self-renunciation. ‘From that moment on the self was no longer something to be made but something to be renounced and deciphered.’
p. 99
This would bring us to a conception of the good life as a kind of self-making, related in this way to the ancient ‘aesthetic of existence’ that one would make one's own life a work of art. ‘… the principal work of art one has to take care of, the main area to which one has to apply aesthetic values is oneself, one's life, one's existence.’
p. 109
Two hundred years ago, in 1784, Kant responded to the question posed by a Berlin newspaper: ‘What is enlightenment?’, by equating enlightenment with the attainment of maturity through the use of reason.
p. 131
Ideology is the result of distortion introduced by the oppressive exercise of power by the dominant class. Only if such distortions were seen through and the repression dispelled would true consciousness be possible.
pp. 140–141
Thomas Kuhn, also operates on the principle that ‘there are many ways to read a text, and the ones most accessible to a modern are often inappropriate when applied to the past’; he therefore offers his students the following hermeneutical maxim: ‘When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, I continue, when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.’
p. 176
Long accounted the ‘noblest’ of the senses, sight traditionally enjoyed a privileged role as the most discriminating and trustworthy of the sensual mediators between man and world.
p. 180
For the ‘classical’ mind, the essence of madness was either blindness, a term which ‘refers to the night of quasi-sleep which surrounds the images of madness, giving them, in their solitude, an invisible sovereignty’, or dazzlement, which means that ‘the madman sees the daylight, the same daylight as the man of reason (both live in the same brightness); but seeing this same daylight, and nothing but this daylight, he sees it as void, as night, as nothing.’
p. 182
The gaze is no longer reductive, it is, rather, that which establishes the individual in his irreducible quality. But what is in fact ‘seen’ is not a given, objective reality open to an innocent eye. Rather, it is an epistemic field, constructed as much linguistically as visually, which is no more or less close to the ‘truth’ than what it replaced. ‘In its sovereign exercise, the gaze took up once again the structures of visibility that it had itself deposited in its field of perception.’
p. 187
As an arbitrary human tool, language is understood as a neutral medium of communication. Inclined towards nominalism, language in the classical age also privileged the most neutral verb possible: the verb ‘to be’.



According to Foucault, ‘the manifestations and sign of truth are to be found in evident and distinct perception. It is the task of words to translate the truth if it can; but they no longer have the right to be considered a mark of it. Language has withdrawn from the midst of beings themselves and has entered a period of transparency and neutrality.’
p. 193
‘In the Military Schools, the very walls speak the struggle against homosexuality and masturbation.’
p. 195
‘My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.’
p. 221–222
‘“Truth” is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. … “Truth” is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A “regime” of truth.’



Foucault undertook to write a history of statements that claim the status of truth, a history of these ordered procedures. To attempt to write such a history one must isolate certain kinds of discursive practices — practices for the production of statements — which will be ‘characterized by the delimitation of a field of objects, the definition of a legitimate perspective for the agent of knowledge, and the fixing of norms for the elaboration of concepts and theories. Thus, each discursive practice implies a play of prescriptions that designates its exclusions and choices.’



Foucault wanted to show that there were rules of formation common to the apparently unrelated sciences of natural history, economics, and grammar, as well as that these rules of formation, sometimes called the episteme of the classical period, were totally unlike what preceded and came after them.



Foucault's work placed itself in tension with the kind of history that was concerned with the already given, commonly recognized ‘facts’ or dated events, and whose task was to define the relations, of causality, antagonism, or expression, between these facts or events.

2paradoxosalpha
Abr 13, 2013, 12:50 pm

I would hesitate to endorse any view as the current thinking on such a topic. As it happens, though, I recently read an interesting paper that continues the Kant-Foucault discussion: Elizabeth A. Povinelli's "The Will to Be Otherwise/The Effort of Endurance" in Future Foucault: Afterlives of Bodies and Pleasures.

3vy0123
Editado: Abr 16, 2013, 1:36 am

2 ~ Thank you. Would you hesitate to number the schools of view on the current thinking?

4carusmm
Maio 19, 2016, 3:25 am

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5carusmm
Maio 19, 2016, 3:37 am

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