Much has been said on Foucault’s two interventions on the question: what is the Enlightenment. These two short articles (dated 1978 and 1984) might be read as Foucault’s testament on what is philosophy, his critique of the modernist-postmodernism debate, as well as an implicit reply on the issue of the task of modernity to his critics, particularly Habermas. However, the texts are best read in conjunction with Foucault’s self description in the entry to a dictionary of philosophy signed under false name, his treatment of Kant in The Order of Things, and more importantly his unpublished Commentary on Kant’s Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. Even though these are interventions that took place over a period of time that stretches from Foucault’s intellectual beginnings to his latest writings, rather than a chronological coherence, we can find here a statement of aims, partly covered in his ouvre, partly betrayed.

Kant’s Anthropology aimed at a wide public audience. In 1797 its two publications gained more popularity than the Critiques. Kant here dwells on topics such as memory, mental illness, temperament, people’s psychology, the phenomenon and the limits of reasons. First he deduces a priori principles from a metaphysics of the natural and a metaphysics of the human world (customs). Secondly, he describes phenomenal reality on the basis of experience in terms of empirical knowledge of nature (Physis) and an empirical knowledge of man (Anthropology). The attention granted by Foucault to this particular work is justified on a number of grounds. Foucault aims to unravel the empirical foundations of the critiques in some notion of language. Language will be the anthropological point where the a priori is questioned in its validity as the conditio sine qua non of the activity of cognition.