Philosophy, Enlightenment, Diagnostics

Some ten years after Foucault’s characterization of philosophy as a diagnostic activity associated with “a kind of radical journalism,”1 he returns to this theme in a number of short articles and conversations found at the end of his authorship. At this point, he emphasizes that the origins of his conception of philosophy reaches further back than to Nietzsche. In particular, he focuses on a number of occasional writings published by Kant. At the close of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, Foucault develops his ideas about philosophy as a diagnosis of the present by relating to Kant and the Enlightenment tradition rather than Nietzsche as a precursor to his own thought. However, the aim for Foucault is still to articulate how one can understand philosophy as historically situated. More precisely, he focuses on the three following questions: What are the precursors to a conception of philosophy as a diagnosis of the present? How has such a conception of philosophy been developed? Finally, what does such a conception of philosophy imply? This endeavor regards writing the history of how philosophy comes to understand itself as a historically situated activity, the purpose of which is to diagnose its own epoch. Foucault seeks to write the generative history of contemporary diagnostics, or a genealogy, so as to explicate the conception of philosophy as diagnosis of the present.