Assignment: Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

You may either start by listening to Foucault (video on the right, about 5:33 minutes), or just read the translation below. Roll your cursor over bolded text to get explanations; click on the fragments highlighted in yellow to open up exercises.

THE PRESENTER:
The book Les mots et les choses [The Order of Things] by Michel Foucault has just come out in the collection of “Sciences humaines” [“Human Sciences”] of the Gallimard publishing house. What is your idea of the human being?

FOUCAULT:
[0:15] I think that the human being was if not a nightmare, at least a very specific, specifically determined figure, historically situated within our culture.

THE PRESENTER:
You suggest that it is something invented?

FOUCAULT:
Yes, the human being is an invention. In the 19th century, even at the beginning of the 20th century, people thought that human being is a fundamental reality, which we can study. People thought that it is the search of truth about the human being that, since the Greeks, has lead all the investigations of science, moral philosophy, and most certainly of philosophy.

[1:03] When one looks at things from a closer perspective, one can wonder if this idea, namely that the human being always existed and that the human being was always there, waiting, so to speak to be taken care of by a science, a philosophy or a moral system, one wonder if this idea is not an illusion, an illusion specific to 19th century.

[1:23] To say the truth, up until the end of the 18th century, up to the French Revolution, nobody has reflected on the human being as such. It is quite puzzling that the notion of ‘humanism’, a notion that we ascribe to the Renaissance, is a notion quite recent. Open up the Littré Dictionary, you will find nowhere the word ‘humanism,’ because the word ‘humanism’ is an invention of the 19th century, and indeed of the end of the 19th century. [1:49] Before the 19th century, we can say that the human being did not exist. What existed was a certain number of problems, a certain number of forms of knowledge and thinking, where people reflected on Nature, Truth, Movement, Order, Imagination, Representation, etc., but where the issue of the human being did not exist.

[2:19] Human being is a figure that has appeared at the end of the 18th and at the beginning of the 19th century, a fact which has given the rise to what has been called ‘the human sciences.’ The human being — the brand new Man, thus invented at the end of the 18th centur -, has given rise to all this ‘humanism”, all this ‘humanism,’ which manifests itself nowadays through Marxism and through Existentialism.

[2:44] But I think that paradoxally, the development of the ‘human sciences’ leads us toward the disappearance of the human being rather than toward the apotheosis of the human being.

[2:59] Indeed, what do we witness now among the human sciences? In fact, human sciences do not discover the concrete, individual, positive in some way, nucleus of human existence. On the contrary. What we see when we study, for instance the functioning and the structures of kinship (as Lévi-Strauss did), or when we study the great Indo-European myths (as did Dumézil), or when we study the very history of our knowledge, we realize that what we discover is not the human being in its true nature, the human being in what he/she can have positive, but what we discover are big systems of thought, large formal structures, which are, in a certain sense, the ground upon which specific individuals appear in history.

[3:55] This produces nowadays a complete reversal of our thinking in comparison of what was taking place even a couple of years ago. I am convinced that we witness today a radical break with the 19th century, with all this beginning of the 20th century. This break, we consider it to be not as a refusal, or a rejection, but rather a distancing in respect to Sartre. I think that Sartre, who is a major philosopher, is still a man of the 19th century.

[4:29] Why? Because all the work of Sartre was to make the human being fit his/her fundamental meaning; all Sartre’s work consists in searching what in human existence is absolutely authentic, he wanted bring the human being back to him/herself, give back to the human being some meanings that may have been lost. Indeed, Sartre’s thinking consists in a philosophy of the alienation, an alienation that has to be overcome.

[5:06] We want to do the exact contrary. We want to demonstrate that what is individual, what is particular, what constitutes the specific experience of man, is just a sparkling on the surface of the big formal systems, and our contemporary thinking has to reconstruct these formal systems on the surface of which floats, from time to time, the foam and the image of a specific existence.

Complete the exercise below and check your score:
Read again the end of Foucault’s interview. See how he opposes his philosophy to Sartre’s. Now go back to Camus’ “Helen’s Exile.” After discussing the role of Christianity, Camus says: “Now that God is dead, all that remains is history and power.” He then goes on critiquing “our philosophers….” (read until the end of this paragraph). What, do you think, Camus would say about the dispute between Sartre and Foucault? (answer using no more than 70 words).