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Generally speaking, there has been a tendency to emphasize the great opposition between the Frankfurt School and French poststructuralists in questions pertaining to the Enlightenment and the ways of solving the resultant historical problems at the present time. The heated controversy of Jean-François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas on the possibility of social consensus and agreement in the kaleidoscopic postindustrial society is universally known. The French held that the idea of a universal cultural code was destined to remain a utopian dream, sooner or later reading to social terror. The Germans, however, with Habermas as their leader, were of the opinion that a new social agreement was close at hand, and that a final effort would solve the matter, The total collapse of the ideals of the Enlightenment in the wars of the 20th century was a technical error for them, to be smoothed out afterwards, Yet the descriptions of the contemporary civilization of the day, offered by the two schools, coincide to a considerable extent. It takes no keen observation to notice the similarity between Frankfurt and Paris in their perception of life. In addition to the above-mentioned observation about the kaleidoscopic nature of the social order, they both profess the disappearance of the classical Marxist class society, the consistent discrediting of the metaphysical mode of thought, the absorption of the energy of social confrontations in the careerist struggle for higher positions within the same society, and the subjection of the personal motivation of people to the needs of the reproduction of the governing social system. Michel Foucault, together with other poststructuralists, devoted his whole life to demolishing this world based cm Enlightenment philosophy and modernism. Towards the end of his life, his discursive analyses of the history of science, the control mechanisms of contemporary society and the identity problems of modem man, due to Nietzsche's vitalist ideas, tended towards anarchist methods of improving the world, designed to find local, practical and individual ways for liberating man from social oppression. The desire to increase the individual freedom of man led him to ethical quests that in many ways brought him back to Kant and other Enlightenment philosophers. Foucault's later philosophy contains elevated idealism, traditionally attributed to the members of the Frankfurt School. This, however, points to the fact that Paris is closer to Frankfurt than geographers tend to think. At least in the cultural landscape. In his last major work, "The History of Sexuality", Foucault set out to elaborate an ethical code that could equally well be applied to both private and social life. Like Nietzsche, he always emphasized the difference between the ethical imperatives and morals, which he regarded as an instrument of social oppression, a norm of leveling. He viewed ethics principally as a process of self-creation, man's ability to turn his life "into a work of art that will be completed at the moment of death". Why would a lamp or a house be the object of art, and not our own life?, he asks rhetorically.… [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
