Expressing Freedom

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For a discussion of freedom to begin with some reference to Kant is hardly surprising. Kant's work remains a standard reference for ethical or political philosophy and freedom is, as Kant puts it, the keystone to his whole system.' The appeal to Foucault is probably more unexpected. Positive references to freedom intervene only in Foucault's later texts and the most explicit discussions of the topic appear in articles or interviews more than in his major works. Not only is the concept less pervasive than in Kant's work, not only is the systematic role Kant grants it unimaginable for Foucault, but when Foucault does appeal to the idea of freedom he frequently reminds his readers that the sense he attributes to the concept must be at odds with the metaphysical concept. When Foucault does refer to freedom, he specifies that he is particularly at odds with the concept of freedom that he takes to be Kant's legacy. What then is to be learned by considering Kant and Foucault together on the subject of freedom? Let me start by pointing out that the two thinkers share a gesture in invoking freedom to describe the stakes of their critical analyses. Both of them invoke the possibility of freedom as that which gives a point to their work. Again Kant's claim is well known: the "point" of critical thinking is to fully exploit the possibility of self-realization and thus depends on there being freedom.2 The co-implication of the labor of reason and the progress of freedom is the very basis of the value of critical thinking. All this is quite familiar coming from Kant. Less obvious perhaps, is the fact that Foucault takes a similar position. It is implicit in the plea he makes at the end of his essay on the Enlightenment, for a continuation of critical work involving specific historical enquiries.3 It is made even more explicit when Foucault explains the motivations of his analyses. Although he explicitly rejects the Kantian dream of liberation through the exercise of reason, when pushed to explain what is to be gained from his own work, Foucault falls back on what he himself qualifies as an optimistic belief in freedom. I dwell on grasping the mechanisms of effective exercise of power; and I do so because those who are inserted in these power relations, those who are implicated in them, can, through their actions, through their existence or their rebellion, escape from these relations, transform these relations, in other words no longer be in a position of submission [bret; ne plus etre soumis].... From this point of view, all my research rests on a postulate of absolute optimism.4 The value of minute descriptions of mechanisms of power is here held to derive from the possibility that those who are implicated in these relations can "escape" or "transform" them. The analysis of specific situations is of interest because it reveals how certain transformations can change the rules of the game and how such changes can allow those implicated in those particular power relations no longer to simply submit to them. Such is the optimistic postulate that gives its point to Foucault's research. As another interview makes clear, this postulate is nothing other than a belief in human freedom: What I try to analyse are the practices, and the logic immanent to the practice, the strategies which bear out the logic of these practices and, therefore, the way in which individuals, freely, through their struggles, their confrontations, their projects, constitute themselves as subjects of their practices or, on the contrary, refuse the practices which are offered to them. I hold a solid belief in human freedom.5 To understand how individuals constitute themselves as subjects of their practices, or on the contrary refuse the practices offered to them, is then, according to Foucault, to understand how subjects exercise their freedom. To believe that subjects can refuse the practices offered to them is to hold a solid belief in human freedom. …