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February 18, 2003
There is a good post at this Public Address about Foucault's understanding of how we situate a culture in the present. This is based on a re-reading of Kant's essay on the Enlightenment.
I find this material very interesting because understanding how we situate ourselves in our modern culture was what I was trying to do with the previous 'Water and Enlightenment' dreaming blog. I was, to use Foucualt's language, interrogating the present or writing a critical history of our own time from the perspective of the way we have historically used water to make the deserts bloom.
What Foucault does, and this theme is picked up and highlighted by This Public Address, is to suggest that we interpret the Enlightnment as a part of modernity and envisage this as "a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos. " What we get from this interpretation is 'a permanent critique of our historical era'.
This emphasis on critique is very useful for philosophy which has seen better days. The ethos of critique transgresses the old modernist view of philosophy as a self-sufficient tightly enclosed realm of its own, that is still so deeply embedded in the academic philosophy institution. There it is a sort of modernist monad, where each philosophical work "represents" the universe, but it has no windows; and it represents the universal within its own walls. In other words, philosophy's own structure (of mechanistic materialism) is objectively the same as that of the universal.
Foucault's intervention is useful because it provides a pathway for philosophy to continue its autonomous thinking in the historical present when it has been rendered harmless and impotent. Philosophy is being downsized in the corporate university; it is often distorted into a series of slogans in the conflict with postmodernism; it has a public existence as a high cultural good that is no longer taken seriously by anybody any more; and is often identified with religion by neo-liberals in public debates over green issues in civil society.
Foucault gives the ethos of 'a permanent critique of our historical era' an aesthetic twist through the use of Baudelaire. It concentrates on doing the critique of history as an ontology of self --reinventing the self---as well as a concern for freedom. This has largely re-geared in the liberal academy to identity politics, gender and gay subjectivity. This pathway makes philosophy as a mode of autonomous thinking sexy and alive in the present.
But we can give it another twst if we cast an eye on one of the key pre-suppositions of the Enlightenment: its universal tendency towards the progressive domination of nature for human benefit through a calculative, instrumental reason that uses technoscience as an instrument. It is this pathway that was explored by my Water & Enlightenment dreaming post.
In a response to my post Richard Kahn at Vegan Blog comments in his Water Philosophy (WED. Feb.19 2003)
"The guiding call for a critical theory of the present moment that can apply the historical insights of how humans and the wasting of natural resources co-construct one another runs throughout the piece [on philososphy.com.] Vegan Blog approves, but would insist that the notion of "our liberal Enlightenment" project be further decentered and displaced by a more radical reconstructive vision."
I wholeheartedly agree. A different way of regarding nature is required and more ecological sustainable practices need to be developed if our rivers are to be restored to health. But this involves working within the world of public policy, and hence raises the question of how can philosophy operate in political life.
Foucault is of use here. He suggests that we undertake the ethos of a permanent critique of the liberal mode of life from where we are institutionally situated, and then endeavour to transgress its limits. If we work within the institutions of politics and public policy rather than academia, then saving our rivers for their own sake--- through clawing back water from the irrigators--- transgresses the old notion of rivers being used as irrigation channels and drains. So philosophy in political life work on the limits.
It is a rather unsatisfactory place to be as philosophy appears as the fool in the court of the powerful. An eco-philosophy in public life is so often dismissed out of hand as an irrationalism or a religion by the defenders of the economic liberal Enlightenment. They are deeply hostile to economic growth through the free market being shaped for the ends of ecological sustainablity. because it means that politics shapes economic life for ethical/poltical ends in the name of the common good. They see red.
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