From transcendental illusion to anthropological illusion: Foucault on Kant’s defense

Abstract

This paper attempts to shed light on the figure of the modern man as an empirical transcendental double such as characterized by Michel Foucault in The order of things, and in Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. According to Foucault, our modernity is marked by Kant’s discovery of the transcendental. Since then, man may be thought empirically or transcendentally; in its empirical aspects or in its conditions of possibility. The difference between empirical and transcendental that in Kant represents two possible ways of thinking man will, however, suffer an inflection, coming to designate an ontological difference in man itself. The new figure of man as a double is therefore a result of one confusion between what is empirical and what is transcendental. Such confusion will be called by Foucault anthropological illusion and must be understood as a new interpretation and as a repetition of transcendental illusion pointed out by Kant in Critique of Pure Reason. Hence, if the first illusion was a transgression of natural reason beyond the limits of experience, the second will consist in a transgression of Kant’s distinction between empirical and transcendental, since it intends to know positively the finiteness that is in the origin of the transcendental illusion.