In one of his last essays, one that is uncharacteristic in its positive and programmatic format, Michel Foucault asked: “What is modern philosophy?… modern philosophy is the philosophy that is attempting to answer the question raised by Kant two centuries ago: What is Enlightenment?” Foucault, echoing Kant, answered that Enlightenment is not the name of an epoch but the exit from immaturity to maturity. The possibility of that exit lies in the relationship the philosopher establishes with the use of reason at the present historical moment. Such a philosopher is not searching for origins and uncovering totalities, nor sculpting Utopias. A modern philosopher, one who is curious about the specificity of the present moment, is someone seeking to find out what difference it makes to be thinking today. This is a critical task in the Kantian sense of an exploration of limits. The task is to inquire into the conditions in which the use of reason is legitimate “in order to determine what can be known, what must be done, and what may be hoped.” Such an inquiry entails reflection on the limits of the individual's free use of reason, the political conditions under which that use is possible, and a diagnosis of the current state of affairs. It sits at the crossroads of “critical reflection and reflection on history.” As we will see, it requires an understanding of thought as a practice and critical thought as a specific kind of situated testing and reflection on the results of that testing which is thoroughly active.

The genteel tradition in American letters was born in the early Republic. An active periodical culture came into being during this time, providing a forum for persons of learning to expound their thoughts on society and literature. With the pronouncements and actions of such critics, the overwhelming majority of whom were men, originates the split – or, more accurately, the obscuring of the connection – between money-making and the arts that has characterized elite literary judgment in this country well into the twentieth century. But the relation between high culture and the commercial spirit was not one just of opposition; it was also a relation of complicity. The very magazines that were airing patrician views accommodated the popular reading habits of the nascent liberal order and opened their pages to voices that disputed established hierarchies. No one more vociferiously proclaimed literature's superiority to the vulgarities of American life than did the foppish editor and essayist Joseph Dennie. Yet this archconservative struggled to make authorship a vocation and helped prepare the way for Washington Irving, the nation's first financially successful writer.

Early periodicals in both England and America evolved out of newspapers and were often indistinguishable from them, a lineage that militated against the segregation of art from mundane affairs. American newspapers were an important outlet for cultural production; they welcomed poetry, literary essays, and vignettes, and their format frequently effaced the line between factual and nonfactual material. Leafing through the papers gives one a vivid sense of the interpenetration of early culture with everyday life.

There can have been few periods of theatrical malaise as extended and as acute as that of the 1870s and early 1880s. Theatre, it was generally agreed by most who wrote about it, did not reflect the intellectual and scientific advances of the nineteenth century, nor did it address the fundamental problems created by an age of industrialization and urbanization. Zola's famous call-to-arms, the essay 'Naturalism in the Theatre' (1880), was but the most inflammatory contribution to what was becoming, by the late 1870s, an escalating critical assault upon the theatre. Zola accused French and, by implication, European drama of being mechanical, superficial, lacking in authentic characters, and perpetuating the outworn cliches of Romanticism. These objections were shared by critics elsewhere. The brothers Hart, leading theorists of the German naturalist movement, bewailed the decadence of German theatre, claiming that no great drama had been written since Schiller and that acting had been in decline since the Napoleonic wars. Everything presented on stage was intended either to complement the 'trivial, shallow taste of the public' or to underpin those values that created a complacent, materialistic society. In England things were little better; Harley Granville-Barker, looking back on the 1880s, suggests that theatre was all 'a rather childish affair'.

A recent ethics textbook aimed at university-level students, in listing the presuppositions of any ethical system, begins, “Singular moral judgments are never merely singular.” By their very nature moral judgments are implicitly universalizable, and only “a peculiar kind of irrationality” that “has come to infect contemporary thinking” could allow one to dispute this self-evident truth. Aristotle was mystified by those who claimed that a characteristic function could be found for an eye, a hand, a foot, a carpenter, or a tanner, but that none could be found for human beings in general. An ethical principle, according to Kant, must be universally applicable if it is to be considered as having any validity whatsoever.

Foucault, however, disconcerts. By claiming that there are no universally applicable principles, no normative standards, “no order of human life, or way we are, or human nature, that one can appeal to in order to judge or evaluate between ways of life,” Foucault, according to Charles Taylor, relinquishes any critical power that his historical analyses might have. Without such a “normative yardstick,” according to Jiirgen Habermas, Foucault's historical analyses cannot be genuinely critical. Indeed, Foucault's skepticism with regard to the notions of universal human nature or universal rationality is clear. He associates universal human nature with the Enlightenment doctrine of humanism, which provides a vision of the human essence with which men and women are expected to conform, thus offering a universal criterion of moral judgment.

In his Introduction to the 1957 edition of his Collected Plays, Arthur Miller singled out certain aspects of Ibsen's work for comment:

In 1873 - close to the mid-point of half a century of creative authorship - Ibsen published the drama which he himself regarded as his 'hovedvserk', his 'main work' or masterpiece: Emperor and Galilean. It was not to be a historical drama of the merely traditional kind. Ibsen's choice of subtitle - 'a world-historic drama' - betrayed his ambitions.

It was a vast historical canvas which he then unfolded, much broader than that of any of his earlier dramas. Years of painstaking labour, including the close study of historical sources, went into this evocation of characters and events from a distant past: the Roman Empire of the fourth century AD and the last twelve years of the life of Julian the Apostate.

Ibsen himself admitted in his correspondence [iv, 603-9]x that the historical material he had been grappling with was enormous, and that he realized that he had sacrificed years of his life to this mammoth work, a 'double' drama in ten Acts. To call forth this historical epoch had been 'a Herculean task'. Nevertheless he was persuaded that he had succeeded in re-creating these historical characters in 'realistic' form. This had however not been his main concern: his perspective of history here had been — to use Nietzsche's terminology — neither antiquarian nor monumental.

The disruptive modes in sermonizing and pamphleteering in eighteenth-century America compete with the predisposition toward consensus evident in so much writing of the period. As the first chooses perception through crisis, so the second emphasizes the possibilities in reason and progress. Separate narratives, they both contribute to revolutionary discourse – sometimes in the same breath. The skill in revolutionary writing demands the promiscuous manipulation of these tendencies in prose that often tries to be provocative and encompassing at once, but an accident of history tips the balance between them. Acrimony grows on all sides in the 1780s and, with it, an intellectual preoccupation; early republicans yearn for a better definition of their experiment in government. Constitutionalism will control that quest, and its impulses are consensual in form.

From the first, American constitutionalism differs from its English equivalent in its commitment to the written word. The biblical conjunction of sovereignty and the book of law, the need for an artificially imposed order in the wilderness, and the politics of Anglo–American relations–these factors all encourage a literal documentation of governmental forms as the reference point of communal identity. Since every act of founding a new community is also a challenge to the status quo ante, the challenge itself, however implicit, must be laid to rest in new claims of authority, placement, and acceptance. Invariably, then, community in America begins in some act of writing. If such writings tend to confirm traditional beliefs, they also reconstitute those beliefs in a moment of registered agreement, and these moments in them-selves soon become a prerequisite to group identity.

From the very start of his career, Henrik Ibsen learned the compulsions of working to a rigorous deadline. When in the autumn of 1851 he was offered a post at the newly established theatre in Bergen, his contract stipulated that he was to 'assist the theatre as dramatic author'. The unwritten assumption was that he would be expected to come forward with an original dramatic work, all ready and rehearsed for performance, every 2 January - the anniversary of the founding of the theatre. This, as he soon discovered, was to be achieved alongside a punishing regime of daily practical work in the theatre as 'Instructeur'.

His first 'anniversary' occasion, on 2 January 1852, clearly allowed him insufficient time to compose a new full-scale dramatic work; but he did go some way towards meeting his obligations by writing a 'Prologue', partly in rhymed and partly in unrhymed verse, the sentiments of which placed the young author very firmly behind the nationalistic endeavours of the new theatre [i, 619-20].

The succeeding five anniversary occasions — and the nature and quality of the works performed — clearly testify that during these years Ibsen found himself having to work at the composition of his dramas under severe time pressure. On the first of these, in 1853, St John's Night flopped, running for only two performances; although at the time he was quite ready to acknowledge the play as having come from his pen, in later life he tried to disown it [see i, 686].

against interpretation

For all Foucault's reservations about modernity and authorship, his writings are typical of a modernist author in their demand for interpretation. Any writing, of course, requires some interpretation as part of our efforts to evaluate, refine, extend, or appreciate its achievement; or to provide special background that readers outside the author's culture or historical period may require. But certain authors – in literature, the twentieth-century modernists are among the best examples – present themselves as so immediately and intrinsically “difficult” as to require special interpretative efforts even for those well equipped to understand them. The Wasteland, Cantos, and Finnegans Wake, for example, require explanation, even for culturally and historically attuned readers, in a way that Paradise Lost, the Essay on Man, and Emma do not. Philosophy, at least since Kant and Hegel, has also provided its share of “intrinsically obscure” writing. Although it may not be easy to formulate the precise difference, it is clear that Wittgenstein, the later Heidegger, and Derrida require a sort of interpretation that Russell, Dewey, and Quine do not.

Foucault's penchant, particularly prior to Discipline and Punish, for the modernist obscure explains much of the demand for interpretations of his work. But the need to interpret Foucault sits ill with his own desire to escape general interpretative categories. More important, as the enterprise of interpretation is usually understood, interpreting Foucault is guaranteed to distort his thought. Interpretation typically means finding a unifying schema through which we can make overall sense of an author's works.

As many historians admit, a record of past events is the hybrid product of facts and interpretation. The Puritans, convinced of the flawed and fallen nature of humanity, distrusted all accounts of the past except those of the Bible. At the same time, they produced a host of personal narratives of individual lives and histories of the corporate New England enterprise because they believed that, even in its corrupted state, human reason is one of God's primary vehicles for communicating His lessons to humanity. A record of God's dealings with His people could be spiritually beneficial. Funeral sermons rehearsed the lives of deceased saints, and election sermons recounted the spiritual record of the community. Biographies, autobiographies, diaries, and conversion narratives recorded the saint's fulfillment of a single destiny, but histories charted the progress of God's larger design.

Although the specific focus of a particular text might be on the one or the many, Puritan authors and audiences believed that the lives of the individual and. of the group were inseparable. The church represented the body of Christ, with every member such an integral part that if one person were in distress the entire body writhed. Conversely, if the spiritual community were troubled, each individual was afflicted. The spiritual journey of a single soul became a community drama that served as a paradigm for the plight of the congregation just as the well-being of the congregation was reflected in each member. With the prescribed interdependence of communal and personal history, good times would generate not only personal assurance but also the self-righteous aggression of the group against enemies and outsiders.

INTERVIEW BY JANET GARTON

JG: You have produced three Ibsen plays, one realistic, one historical and one poetic: Pillars of the Community with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1977, The Vikings at Helgeland in Bergen in 1983, and Peer Gynt in Oslo in 1990. Why these three plays?

JB: It is a peculiar selection and it doesn't necessarily represent my interest in Ibsen. In general I think I tend to go for the flawed masterpiece or the early play or the undiscovered play, more often than not. So there is a certain common ground here, though it might not seem so. In the case of all the Ibsen plays I have done, either I was asked to or I chose to or I was required to adapt in some way, and this is something I always find myself drawn to. Pillars of the Community was the first major production outside Shakespeare that I had ever done at that time for the RSC. I pushed for it because I thought it was a potentially wonderful play. It is one of those plays that has to have a good group cast and there was a very good group available. I was also fascinated by all the problems of how to bring off the ending. I suppose on the surface it is like certain Elizabethan plays: it's plain sailing for four Acts and then goes crazy at the end. So there were resemblances.

The association of the novel with individualism and the middle class has been an enduring staple of literary criticism. Ample historical evidence supports the linkage. In the United States, the novel developed in tandem with democratization and economic expansion, and although the form did not realize its potential until the Age of Jackson, a strong case can be made that it was complicit from its origin with the ethos of the marketplace. Early American fiction stood out as the most privatized and commercially viable of the literary arts, the genre most attuned to the social order of the future. “What is a novel without novelty?” asked the first indigenous novelist, William Hill Brown, in his posthumous Ira and Isabella (1807); his question highlights the insatiable appetite for the new that distinguished fiction from earlier forms of cultural expression. The postrevolutionary novel can be described as a prototypically “liberal” artifact. Anxious guardians of the status quo lambasted novels as popular reading material that pandered to mass tastes and subverted respect for traditional authority. Consumed in solitude, centered on personal ambitions and desires, and attracted, as the name indicates, to unfamiliar experiences, novels contributed to the undermining of a shared public sphere and encouraged the self-seeking outlook that flourished under Jacksonian democracy.

This picture, a familiar one, exaggerates the novel's collusion in the coming order; with the benefit of hindsight, it singles out the features that became dominant rather than those that receded over time. Scholars investigating the genesis of the English novel have begun to qualify the form's identification with the middle class and to see that its retention of conservative and “romance” elements placed it in a complex relation to triumphant individualism.

At the outset of his career, as a stage director in Bergen and subsequently in Christiania (now Oslo), Ibsen developed a keen sense of the practicalities and performance conditions of the living theatre that never left him. That intimate knowledge of the stage and its conventions which the playwright derived from these early experiences fostered his extraordinary sensitivity to the poetry of environment in the theatre. In staging his own early saga dramas, he taught himself to write a carefully visualized, highly charged mise-en-sèene into his plays, aimed at concretizing the psychological states and spiritual conditions of the characters, and designed to create a specific mood that would enhance and strengthen the inner action. Costumes, settings, objects, colours, sounds and lighting effects thus remained, from the beginning of his career to its close, the basic syntax of his dramatic poetry. In turn, the intense theatricality inherent in his work has been the source of its continued vitality in performance, long after the specific theatrical conditions for which a given play seems intended have changed irrevocably.

From 1790 to 1820, there was not a book, a speech, a conversation, or a thought in the state.” So wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1852, glancing back from the heyday of Romanticism to what he considered the cultural blankness of the formative years. Until the 1980s, academic criticism accepted and elaborated this pejorative assessment of postrevolutionary culture. To modern readers, there seemed little to admire in the letters of the early Republic apart from its political documents. The consensus held that the literature produced by Americans before Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper was derivative of English models, lacking in originality and individual expressiveness, and fatally weakened by its commitment to didacticism. In effect, the consensus concurred with the Emersonian judgment that no literary art existed in this country until the awakening of the Romantic spirit.

This picture has now been revised, as new interest in the writing of the early Republic has brought fuller appreciation of that writing's goals and character, but it is instructive to reflect on the reasons for the persistent neglect of postrevolutionary culture. The supposition has been that the writing of the federal era defies sympathetic understanding because it lacks intrinsic merit. This objection assumes that all literature should be held to the same standard of evaluation. It takes for granted the existence of an ahistorical notion of what constitutes literary achievement, one that gives absolute primacy to aesthetic value. Yet the privileging of the aesthetic as something desirable purely for its own sake was itself the product – at least in America – of a historical configuration that postdated the early national period.

The philosophers who have considered Cervantes's Don Quixote to be a major philosophical event can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Indeed, to my knowledge only two have done so: Auguste Comte and Michel Foucault. If Comte had written a history of madness – and he could have – he would have made room for Cervantes, for he referred to Don Quixote more than once in defining madness as an excess of subjectivity and as a passion for countering the contradictions of experience by endlessly complicating the interpretations that experience can have. Yet the author of L'Histoire de la folie turned to Descartes, not Cervantes, for help in presenting the Classical era's idea of madness. Conversely, in Les Mots et les choses, Cervantes and Don Quixote are honored with four brilliant pages, and Descartes is mentioned just two or three times. The single Cartesian text cited, a short passage from the Regulae, comes up only by virtue of the manifest subordination of the notion of measure to the notion of order in the idea of mathesis. And probably also by virtue of the precocious use of the Regulae in La Logique de Port-Royal, Foucault elevates that hitherto neglected account of the logic of signs and grammar to the status of a seventeenth-century masterwork. By this striking displacement of the sites where they might have been expected to be invoked as witnesses, Descartes and Cervantes come to be invested with adjudicative or critical power. Descartes is one of the artisans who set out the standards that resulted in the relegation of madness to the asylum space, where nineteenth-century pathologists found it as an object of knowledge.

In presenting the topic of Michel Foucault's significance as a writer of the history of ethics, I have two main goals. First, I hope to be able to elucidate Foucault's own aims in shifting his attention, in his last writings, to what he himself called “ethics.” These aims, in my opinion, have been widely misinterpreted and even more widely ignored, and the result has been a failure to come to terms with the conceptual and philosophical distinctiveness of Foucault's last works. Volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality are about sex in roughly the way that Discipline and Punish is about the prison. As the modern prison serves as a reference point for Foucault to work out his analytics of power, so ancient sex functions as the material around which Foucault elaborates his conception of ethics. Although the history of sex is, obviously, sexier than the history of ethics, it is this latter history that oriented Foucault's last writings. Foucault once remarked to me, as he had to others, that “sex is so boring.” He used this remark in different ways on different occasions, but one thing he meant by it was that what made sex so interesting to him had little to do with sex itself. His focus on the history of ancient sex, its interest for him, was part of his interest in the history of ancient ethics.