Foucault's Use
Foucault, in his response to Kant, also entitled "What is Enlightenment?", rejects much of the hopeful political content of a people ruled by Sapere Aude. Instead, Foucault looks at the critical tools of using one's own reason, and how disputing Kant's other arguments only serves to reinforce the value of Sapere Aude (Foucault uses the term critical ontology as a synonym for his concept) with a sort of faithful betrayal.
Foucault too, however, roots his vision of Sapere Aude in a definite practice. Instead of a mere theory or doctrine, it becomes an individual "attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are". This attitude uses reason as a tool, to start a historical criticism of "the limits that are imposed on us" to be exercised in "an experiment with the possibility of going beyond" those limits, the limit-experience that is both an individual act, and one that breaks apart the concept of the individual all together.
Read more about this topic: Sapere Aude
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