— Overview
The notes summarized here follow First Readings in French Philosophy, published by the Academy of Philosophy and Dongnyeok. In interviews and essays, Foucault places his research in the context of a critical tradition in modern philosophy. That tradition, as he describes it, takes up again the question Kant had tried to answer two hundred years earlier — “What is Enlightenment?” — and makes it a principal task to raise a critical problem about an ontology of ourselves in the present.
Once we notice that Foucault locates his own work inside that tendency, it is easy to see, the writer says, that his philosophical project is set within a critique of the ontology of the present (l’ontologie du présent). To see what that project is, the account first looks at how this critical tradition started, and what its chief problem was. Late in life, Foucault, summarizing a lifelong philosophical project, said that at its center his thought had been an attempt to answer the problems of today (the notes point to p. 253).
In Foucault’s view, one of the great functions of modern philosophy is to put questions to modernity itself. In a 1983 lecture, he reads Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?” as the first philosophical text to take as its task a questioning of one’s own modernity, and as an important starting text for that modern philosophical attitude. In this reading, a paper of Kant’s on progress is understood in the extension of the Enlightenment essay, and Kant’s question and answer ultimately appear as showing a critical attitude toward revolution.
When that interpretation is set beside a text Foucault published in 1978 on the theme of “critique,” Kant’s definition of Enlightenment and the orientation of that definition turn out, the writer says, to be no different from “the distinctive critical attitude of modernity.” The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.
— Contents and key concepts
A question asked again
The notes summarized here follow First Readings in French Philosophy, published by the Academy of Philosophy and Dongnyeok. In interviews and essays, Foucault places his research in the context of a critical tradition in modern philosophy. That tradition, as he describes it, takes up again the question Kant had tried to answer two hundred years earlier — “What is Enlightenment?” — and makes it a principal task to raise a critical problem about an ontology of ourselves in the present.
Once we notice that Foucault locates his own work inside that tendency, it is easy to see, the writer says, that his philosophical project is set within a critique of the ontology of the present (l’ontologie du présent). To see what that project is, the account first looks at how this critical tradition started, and what its chief problem was.
A 1983 lecture, and a 1978 essay
Late in life, Foucault, summarizing a lifelong philosophical project, said that at its center his thought had been an attempt to answer the problems of today. In his view, one of the great functions of modern philosophy is to put questions to modernity itself. In a 1983 lecture, he reads Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?” as the first philosophical text to take as its task a questioning of one’s own modernity, and as an important starting text for that modern philosophical attitude.
In this reading, a paper of Kant’s on progress is understood in the extension of the Enlightenment essay, and Kant’s question and answer ultimately appear as showing a critical attitude toward revolution. When that interpretation is set beside a text Foucault published in 1978 on the theme of “critique,” Kant’s definition of Enlightenment and the orientation of that definition turn out, the writer says, to be no different from “the distinctive critical attitude of modernity.” The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.
Source
- Notes on Foucault’s placing of his work in a critical tradition that rereads Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?,” including a 1983 lecture and a 1978 text on critique, drawn from First Readings in French Philosophy (Academy of Philosophy, Dongnyeok).
Last updated: 14 November 2026
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