Compare and Contrast Essay on Kant and Foucault

Introduction

The relationship between Kant and Foucault is an important topic which has received little attention. Yet Kant was one of the central figures in Foucault's work. One of Foucault's publications was Kant's lecture translation on anthropology that included an introduction monograph. In his 'enlightenment' essay, he presented Kantianism version in his whole project. The enlightenment and Kantian criticism by Foucault's emphasizes values and truth. Self-professed Kantianism by Foucault's can be read to encourage change in Foucault's intellectual audience. This was a call to take up the enlightenment thought thread that is found in Foucault's essay. However, Kant believed that enlightenment is a process which started to takes place and a historical phenomenon of given task which everyone should pass to herself or himself . On the other hand, Foucault thinks that enlightenment is an age of using reason and separating legitimate and an illegitimate reason through developing a critique.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Contrast

A lot of Kant's philosophical work is mainly focused on what lies outside the history. However, Foucault in his work is so much concerned with current happening. This is evident where Foucault regards Kant's enlightenment essay to be exhibiting the transgressive character of critique where ontology of present represented enlightenment as an ongoing process and an obligation or task. (Lotringer & Honchcroth, 2018). Kant is seen to have paid attention to what was already happening in the present. He encouraged states and individual to initiate change to further the process. His essay portrays some attitude which operates as a challenge or act of defiance in ways people are currently being governed. He analyses the present as a teleological process where people moves towards greater enlightenment. Foucault states that there is a kind of command that Kant provides to his audience for mustering the courage that helps transform the present through pulling themselves out from self-imposed immaturity. Foucault's investigation object is said to be plural where it addresses all form of possible experience, of necessary conditions and the universe .He describes a form of experiential form in abstract's finer grain at formal determination level of specific experience, human action form of specific experiences, of comportment and of human action form. In this case, determination of experience possibilities is not only determined by experience possibilities it also regulates and helps to distinguish that experience from the others which are characterized by series of different possibilities. Whereas Kant's critical investigation object is a generally a cognitive experience form in Foucault's work. It can be said to be a form of experience that is local historically successive, exercises of regulated and stable practices. (Djaballah, 2008).

Foucalt's basis of transgression movement is made up of counter-modernity attitude. Where he explained that to reach beyond an alternative of inside-outside there is a need to locate the enlightenment enquires at the limit attitude juncture. Whereas Kant had an intention of finding out the limits of knowledge that would renounce transgressions. Foucault's intended to know what constituted obligatory and universal and where arbitrary product constraints and singular contingent resides.

In his essay, Kant sets out a time sense which he believed he is living in.In so doing he spies for radically new potential. This involves a political maturation that involves becoming self-managed. His concern is to nurture and establish a sense of its limits that which are necessary. Kant argues that one of the most stable configurations that help to further political maturity cause is rational despotism. He hitched freedom to a critical self-reflection or self-awareness on where the self should not or should be to use reason. However, Kant's specific content of individual responsibility is prescribed, Foucault regards the form that seems interesting and suggests on an essential thing about political terrain in which we live today. Kant proposed on an ever reflexive subject that modernity is a way of life, an ethos predicted to understand on essential condition has a unique possibility of relating to reality. Foucault stated that modernity is only made possible by the ontology of our self.

Compare

Foucault and Kant analyses the limits and possibility of moral, knowledge , subjectivity and values. Foucault stated that Kant attempted through his reason critique to de-subjugate the subject so as the autonomous use of reason enlightenment could be possible. He set forth a primordial responsibility critique's so as to know knowledge. Knowing knowledge is what Foucault is up in a lot of his critical work. Foucault and Kant adopt criticism as a way of thinking and analysis of ideal space of relation between them is the abstraction point which criticism functions as a shared practice, in every case described in different texts and problems. The practice is a standpoint exercise where Kant's texts could be understood in a conceptual and historical space which is regulated by its methods, object conception, second-order implications and its unity.

Foucault's and Kant's ethics of freedom believe that for one to live an ethical life, morality should be removed from causal nature determinism. However, Kant's morality is so much built on 3rd antinomy and they are caused through freedom which is known as free will or there ought to be no freedom in the causal nature known as determinism. Foucalts ethics could also be considered in the same way where he believed and stated that ethics is a practice of freedom.

References

Lotringer, S., & Honchcroth, L. (2018). The Politics Of The Truth. Retrieved from

http://14.139.206.50:8080/jspui/bitstream/1/2126/1/Foucault,%20Michel%20-%20%20The%20Politics%20of%20Truth.pdf

Djaballah, M. (2008). Kant, Foucault, and forms of experience (p. 14). London: Routledge.