Deleuze’s Kant: Enlightenment and Education

It has long been received opinion that the influence of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud on post-war continental philosophy has resulted generalized towards the claims of the Enlightenment, with respect to both the possibility of objective knowledge of the real, and the possibility of any narrative of progress directed towards the realization of universal political autonomy. This has arisen, we are told, due to repeated attacks by disciples of the masters of suspicion upon the pivotal Enlightenment concept of the free subject of pure reason, the linchpin of the vital critical distinction between objectively is and objectively ought to be. The doxa also has it that this requires us to choose between two confessions: either renewed faith the Enlightenment or an unblinking acceptance of irrationalism and its consequences. It was this forced choice that Michel Foucault, speaking the context of his debate with Jurgen Habermas, referred to as the blackmail of Enlightenment.1 The question I want to consider here is whether the issue is as simple as it is presented by our philosophical sense. In fact the presuppositions behind the doxa have themselves been an object of critique within contemporary continental philosophy. Along with Foucault himself, it is Gilles Deleuze, I will argue, who has subjected the meaning of Enlightenment and critique contemporary philosophy to radical transformation, one that undercuts the assumptions about Enlightenment that force the aforementioned dilemma upon us. For Foucault and Deleuze, Kant and Nietzsche are central contributors to the idea of Enlightenment, through their respective interpretations of the meaning of philosophical education. Kant remains something of an ambiguous figure for these thinkers, however. The defender of the claim of metaphysics to be the queen of sciences.2 and thus the ultimate foundation of objective theoretical and practical knowledge, he is also read by Foucault, for example, as the prophet of limit-attitude thought that instantiates modernity, not as an epoch, but as an ethos or practice that radically subverts the notion of objective, disinterested knowledge.3 Kritik is defined by Kant as, above all, discipline in which reason is indeed meant to be its own pupil.4 Reason must scrutinize itself, and thus lay all its possessions for examination. In this way, it can learn about its grasp of the synthetic priori knowledge that provides the foundations upon which all science and morality depend. The individual reasoning subject will then become enlightened regarding the rights (and responsibilities, for these are limited rights) that it possesses common with all other subjects of the universal republic of critical rationality. Foucault, however, interprets Kant's thoughts on Enlightenment such as to marginalize this foundationalist conception of Kritik. He suggests that the question that drives Kantian critique is primarily historical: what difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?.5 This question embodies for Foucault a mode of relating to contemporary reality6 that is concerned above all with freedom, with the task of finding way out of the constraints and deadlocks of the present.7 The overwhelming orientation of modern consciousness for Foucault is towards awareness of temporal and historical discontinuity. The properly philosophical attitude of Kritik associated by Foucault with this consciousness is one that takes discontinuity as an axiom, and thus disavows the atemporal perfection of an arche-science. Once this has been done, is at issue is twofold: firstly, the tracing of the historical descent of the present, order to understand the limits of thought and action the present terms of the contingent circumstances which they have arisen; secondly, the project of creating new patterns of thought and action the present. …