Diagram 1: An overview of the main philosophical directions during modernity
This kind of dichotomy in the philosophical interpretation of modernity is best reflected in the confrontation of the views.11One of their few meetings was on the occasion of Habermas’ visit to the Collège de France (1983), about which D. Eribon (1994) writes. Of Foucault and Habermas, where Habermas (Eribon, 2005: 191) described Foucault’s work as ”postmodernism of the neoconservative” who invokes positions in modernity to ”establish ruthless antisemitism.” In his work, he recognizes the ”spontaneous forces of imagination, subjective experience, sensibility,” to which they attribute a distant and archaic basis. In a Manichean way, they oppose reason to a principle that can only be invoked, whether it is ο the will to power, ο the sovereignty of being. or ο Dionysian poetic power. ”At the same time, Foucault sought to ignore the work of Habermas, and Rabinow, and Dreifus.22It was an invitation to Foucault and Habermas to participate in a seminar on modernism held at the University of Berkeley in the fall of 1984. Still, during the summer of that year, Foucault passed away. Sought to devise a way to overcome this doctrinal conflict. For example, individualization and universalism), while postmodernism represents the restoration of unacceptable irrationalism for Habermas.Foucault briefly explained his position by referring to Kant’s answer Was ist Aufklärung ?33The Berlinische Monatschrift (1784) posed this question and, as particularly important, published the answers of Mendelson and then Kant, who described the Aufklärung as a process by which we abandon ”minors.” Under this term, he understands a particular state of our will that forces us to accept someone else’s authority to use the mind and gives three examples. First, we are in a state of infancy when the book substitutes reason, our spiritual leader covers conscience, and the doctor prescribes diet.
Smaller text, maybe. Nevertheless, it seems that he gradually entered the history of thought into a question to which modern philosophy was not able to answer, nor was it able to resolve it. And here, it has been two centuries since he repeated it, in different forms. From Hegel to Horkheimer or Habermas, through Nietzsche or Max Weber, there is almost no philosophy that, directly or indirectly, has not faced this same question: what, then, is an event called the Aufklärung, which is, to a greater or lesser extent, determined what we are today, what we think and what we do? (Rabinow, 1984: 32-50).
Foucault’s interpretation of the boundaries of modernity is not based on the performance of history as a world process (Hegelian approach). Still, he determines them through the theory of power, i.e., social practices that have led to the discipline of the population. Thus, he does not make a theoretical insight into modernity ”from the position of trust in civic ideals,” but in the book Supervise and Punish , he turns to a new range of thematic occupations (poststructuralism), which in geoepistemological terms best reflects the triad ”hospital-madhouse-prison.” Through this metaphor, Foucault strongly articulated a new political and intellectual interest in the history of the state disciplinary system, which established a new methodological framework for defining modernity. Foucault builds this framework through two synchronous processes that lead to a ”disciplinary society” and different expressions of power.44Establishment of institutions for treatment (hospital and insane asylum) and control of persons (prison).. One is shaped through a new spatial expression of power, while the other is characterized by the decline of the power of European monarchies. Because of this, Foucault’s work can be considered doubly important, for philosophy (power theory) and geography (spatial turn), with the former determining the origin and the latter the end of modernity. Although this is not the subject of this paper, it should be said that from a geographical point of view, its interpretation of the term space is critical, which for Elden & Crampton (2013: 2) is ”a vital part of the battle for control and supervision of individuals, but not as a battle for domination. but as a point of contact between the technologies of power and the technologies of the self55See G. Mutabdzija, Foucault’s geoepistemology: space, heterotopy and archeology, 2021..” The best example of his view of space (Foucault, 2012a) is given in the short essay Of Other Spaces 66Although the essay Of Other Spaces was presented in Tunisia in 1967, it became publicly available until 1986.According to Frank (2009: 67), which became one of his most frequently quoted and anthological texts and ”can rightly be called the founding text of the spatial turn.”
Table 1: Elements of grand theories of social development in modernism and Foucault