Week 2 response

I am not really sure of my understanding of Foucault’s and Kant’s texts. With that having been said, what struck me as most interesting while I was reading Foucault's Introduction was the repeated appearance of the theme of reciprocity. In Foucault's discussion of Spielen, for example, he writes that human beings engage themselves in the world by playing the game, but, at the same time, it is the world that acts as their teacher in the sense that they are bound by the prescriptions and rules of the world. (54) Relationship of reciprocity also exists between Können and the Sollen: borrowing the words of Foucault, “Power at the root of its possibilities” (the Interior) might be “translated and betrayed in its Phenomenon” (the Exterior), but it is in such perversion of Power that the Power is recalled “in the mode of obligation.” (72) Anthropology’s Didactic and Characteristic work in the same way in that “man does not make anything of his possibilities without also being engaged in their manifestations,” (71) and it is in their manifestations that the truth about the possibilities are revealed; in other words, cognizing the Interior of the Human Beings leads to cognizing the Exterior and, in return, cognizing the Exterior helps cognizing the Interior. The question of Was ist der Mensch? in relation to the knowledge of the world seems to work in similar ways: in answering the question of “who is the human being?” one cannot help but to invoke the world because human beings view themselves as “citizens of the world.” It is the ‘I am’ that discovers the world in playing its games, but through their interactions with the world they also come to objectify themselves as a part of the world. (79) A good illustration of this is in the case of Kantian banquet, enabled by language, people converse and interact with each other, and it is in this moment that an individual’s freedom encounters that of others and, as a result, becomes a part of the totality. (102)

Moreover, when the Critique, to the three questions of “what can I know, what should I do, and what may I hope for?”, added the fourth question of “what is human being?”, the fourth question, in turn, gave rise to anthropological questions of “The sources of human knowledge, the extent of the possible and natural use of every knowledge, and the limits of reason.” (82) But Foucault writes that the set of three anthropological questions ultimately comes back to the set of three questions of the Critique. The three anthropological questions can all be answered in terms of the connections between the world and the human beings: in the sense that the world “envelops all real existence”, it is the source of human knowledge; the world is also a human’s domain in that it is a set system of necessities, and so it is the extent of the possible and natural use of every knowledge; the world is also the limits of reason because it is impossible for human beings to function beyond the world. In turn, the world as a source tells human beings what they can know, the world as a domain tells them what it is that they should be doing, and the world as a limit lets them know what they can hope for. Therefore, Foucault writes that anthropological questions, which repeat the questions of the Critique, have no independent content of their own.