Foucault’s diplôme d’études supérieures thesis (roughly equivalent to a Master’s degree by research) under the direction of Hyppolite was submitted in 1949. It was entitled ‘La Constitution d’un transcendantal dans la Phénoménologie de l’esprit de Hegel [The Constitution of a Transcendental in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit]’, but was long thought lost.58 Even when Foucault’s papers were sold to the BNF in 2013 this thesis was not to be found: it appears that Foucault did not keep a copy. However, his nephew, Henri-Paul Fruchaud, found it in Foucault’s mother’s house. It is part of a collection of documents relating to the 1940s and 1950s which Fruchaud donated to the BNF, separate from the main Foucault Fonds. There are two typed copies of the thesis, along with fragments of Foucault’s manuscript and some typed summaries and plans, along with Annexes of references and a bibliography. One of the typescripts is missing several pages, but the other is almost complete and missing only pages 74 and 75. Unfortunately these are also missing from the other version.59
Following a note on references and some ‘Preliminary Remarks’, the thesis is divided into three. The first and second parts are in three chapters; the third part in four. The structure is tied to three questions:
1 What are the limits of the field of phenomenological exploration, and to what criteria must the experience serving as a point of departure for reflection respond?
2 At what point does this regressive exploration end, and what is the limit of this transcendental domain in which experience is constituted?
3 What are the relations of this transcendental world with the actuality of the world of experience from which the reflection has unfolded, and for which it must account?60
Foucault suggests that the first requires an ‘objective examination of the work’; the second a ‘philosophical interpretation’; and the third a ‘critical reflection’.61 The parts are entitled ‘The Transcendental Field’, ‘The Transcendental Subject’ and ‘The Transcendental and History’. In each Foucault outlines the views of Hegel’s predecessors, notably Kant, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, before showing how Hegel resolves some of the problems.62 He also recognizes the historical development of Hegel’s writings, seeing the Phenomenology of 1807 as a break from Hegel’s earlier writings, and leading to the work of the Logic.63 The parts are followed by an eleven-page conclusion, itself unpaginated and filed separately from the body of the text, with the Annexes and Bibliography found in other folders.
Foucault’s argument is that we should not see The Phenomenology of Spirit as an introduction to the Hegelian system or its first part, but rather as an assessment of how a ‘system as the totality of knowledge [savoir]’ could be conceived. Here Foucault is breaking with some of the previous commentators, such as Hyppolite who has seen it as an introduction to the Logic, or Wahl, who had conceptualized it as a noumenology,64 as well as Hegel’s own description of it as ‘System of Science First Part’ in its original title. Foucault suggests it has both a negative, critical examination of previous failures to achieve this, and a positive ‘analysis of moments which constitute the possibility of absolute knowledge’. Essentially, this totality of knowledge ‘is a transcendental “milieu” in which the constituent subject is the ego or self [le moi], and the constitutive structure, the concept. The transcendental unity is a “I know [Je sais]”.’65 Foucault sees the transcendental subject in contrast to Kant’s ‘I think’ and Descartes’s ‘I am’, itself of course founded on the cogito.66 Thought in itself does not found knowledge, but the positive role of the Phenomenology is that it ‘reveals not knowledge itself, but the “element”, the milieu of knowledge [savoir]’.67
In Foucault’s presentation, the dialectical basis to Hegel’s method of transcendental investigation consists of two alternating principles. One is a regressive procedure of going from the complex [composé] to the simple; the other is a progressive procedure going from the simple to the complex. The first step is a way of understanding ‘the unity of the transcendental subject in absolute knowledge’; the second moves from the naked perception of the object to the ‘consciousness of the world’. It is the ‘constant correlation of these two steps that makes the complex unity of the phenomenological method’.68 History is both an element in the transcendental world, but also something which ‘must be overcome [dépassé] by a more fundamental element’.69
Foucault argues that we should interrogate Hegel on his own ground, asking him only questions that he asked himself, a process of immanent engagement with his thought.70 He questions how:
Kant’s philosophy of the transcendental became, in history, a category of thought, how, put otherwise, historicity constituted by the Kantian transcendental became a constituent historicity in later philosophy. When we pass from Kant, inventor of the transcendental, to his successors, we do not pass from one moment of history to another, we pass from a world of effective historical experiences to a possible world of historical experiences.71
Essentially we must ask Hegel how the ‘experience of a fact’ relates to a category.72 As Foucault outlines, ‘far from being a tautology, the fundamental definition of knowledge by the “I know” is the only means of giving a reality and a transcendental sense to the “I think”’ of Kant’.73
The definition of the transcendental ego [Moi] comprises three moments: the first consists in the substitution of a ‘I know’ for ‘I think’; the second discovers that knowledge is at the same time knowledge and constitution of a world of experiences; finally, this constitutive principle is not an anonymous substance, it is an ‘I’ [moi] that is only ever a relation to itself.74
Each of these moments is, for Hegel, ‘dialectically defined’ in relation to earlier attempts to ‘discover the constitutive principle of experience’, in relation notably to Kant and Fichte. Foucault underscores that Hegel does not dissociate these three moments, and that the Phenomenology works on them at different levels. This leads Foucault to ‘the question of the status of philosophy in relation to the transcendental’, the theme of the longest part of his thesis.75 Foucault contends that the whole of the Phenomenology demonstrates Hegel’s point of the system of ethical life [Sittlichkeit] that language is the ‘instrument of reason’.76
All this means that Foucault discusses the way in which Hegel conceptualizes history, which he suggests is connected to another sense of time, that of the ‘time of intuition, the immediate presence of a concept’. For Hegel, the transcendental subject is the consciousness that knows [connaît] it, ‘already present in all experiences’.77 Foucault sees Hegel’s work as a fundamental challenge to the ‘empty history of Kant, and the blind history of Herder’.78 In relation to historical matter it makes it temporal; in ‘relation to historical knowledge it is what prevents history from being seen as external to the becoming that it thinks’.79 Therefore, ‘history can be defined as the totality of experience’.80
The problem of the thesis is therefore to examine the relation between the historical and the transcendental, of the conditions necessary for there to be an historical experience. In this sense, the conditions must already be established, even though they are historically constituted: a circular problem.81 Foucault notes that Hegel transforms an historical question into a philosophical problem.82 He suggests that the crucial issue for Hegel is the contrast between a cyclical history, in which the totality is enclosed, and the possibility of escaping from history, ‘because there is no history without a consciousness that thinks it’, and ‘because history, for this consciousness, has a signification which is not historical: it is religion’.83
The resolution for this, Foucault argues, is the ‘new phenomenological dimension’,