Work · Structuralism & Poststructuralism
What Is Enlightenment?
200 years after Kant: enlightenment as a critical ontology of the present.
Introduction
A late essay, first published in English in 1984 in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow; a different text on the same subject, taken from his 1983 lectures at the Collège de France, appeared in French the same year. Foucault reads Kant’s answer of 1784 as the moment when philosophy began to ask about its own present. Enlightenment is for him not a doctrine to accept or reject – he refuses the “blackmail” of being for or against it – but an attitude. With Baudelaire he describes modernity as an ethos of critical self-invention, and proposes a “historical ontology of ourselves” that examines the limits imposed on us and tests the possibility of going beyond them.
Connections
Responds to
- An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?1784 · Immanuel Kant
More works by Michel Foucault
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