Foucault leitor de Kant: da antropologia à aufklärung

Abstract

We followed three stages of Foucault. readings of Kant's work. From 1961 to 1969 Foucault analyzes archaeologically the relationship between the Critical Project and the Anthropology of Kant, highlighting the emergence of the opening the possibility of confusion between the empirical and the transcendental fields, as occurred later with other thinkers. The opening would have emerged in the Kantian anthropological project when he presented the question "What is man?" With the confusion the man, that was a logical instance in critical project, became an empirical-transcendental double and explanatory principle. From 1970-1978 Foucault genealogically investigated the displacement and articulation between the Critical Project and Aufklärung carried out by Kant in response to "What is Aufklärung?" analyzing and defining his actuality as a new attitude of the man who seeks to become rationally autonomous. Foucault points out in Kant's answer a critical attitude conception that would be close to that he himself formulated starting from the research of resistance to transformations of power relations resulting from state governmentalization control processes, where the ancient right of life and death had been replaced by the government of the conduct of individuals in various fields. From the end of the 70s, and still investigating the Kant’s Aufklärung, Foucault proposes that have occurred in the thought of that philosopher the inauguration of two new philosophical traditions: - the Analytical Truth in the wake of the Critical Project and the Critical Ontology of ourselves in the wake of Aufklärung, to the last one he aligns. In the second tradition Kant, in conflict with the perspective of traditional ontology of being, has proposed a new critical ontology when shifted the epistemological-transcendental question "What do I know?" to "What is this happening?", and bringing to the philosophical-historical field new ontological questions about the present, the individual and the transformation processes of men's attitude. The new critical ontology, as Foucault denominated, is for him the foundation of ethical and political attitude of franking limits, unlike Kant tried to establish formal limits that men could not overcome by individual decision.