Beyond the limits of reason

Kant, critique and enlightenment

Colin McQuillan

pp. 66-82

in: Karinde Boer, Karin de Boer, Ruth Sonderegger (eds), Conceptions of critique in modern and contemporary philosophy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault calls Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason "the threshold of our modernity" and even says that it marks "a fundamental event — certainly one of the most radical that ever occurred in Western thought".¹ Taken out of context, these remarks sound like high praise. They are, however, part of a sweeping criticism of the historical development that made "man" the privileged object of the human sciences at the end of the eighteenth century. According to Foucault, it was Kant's critique that allowed the human sciences to fall into the "anthropological sleep" that remains "a stubborn obstacle standing obstinately in the way of an imminent new form of thought".² For this reason, Foucault denounces Kant as the philosopher who had 'stupefied Western thought, leaving it blind to its own modernity for nearly two hundred years".³

Cited authors

Kant Immanuel

Foucault Michel