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Michel FoucaultThe Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1966A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Human Sciences”
Chapter 10: “The Human Sciences” examines the human sciences (literary studies, sociology, psychology, etc.), the main subject matter of The Order of Things, with all of the concepts, ideas, and history established in the first nine chapters. The chapter is split into six parts.
In part one (“The Three Faces of Knowledge”), Foucault establishes the connection between science and the human sciences. For Foucault, the human sciences were not ignored in previous epistemes; they were simply unimportant areas of study because humans were not objects of study. The human sciences fall between the “three faces of knowledge”: mathematics, science, and philosophy. Each of these branches has, in some way, been a legitimate object of study in past epistemes. Each particular human science falls into a gap between these three legitimized and stable branches of knowledge, with some human sciences borrowing more from one branch than another.
In part two (“The Form of the Human Sciences”), Foucault examines how the human sciences are able to make positivist claims. The empirico-transcendental doublet is crucial for the human sciences to exist. They create the unthought as the field where the knowledge for them to gather is hidden, in much the same way genetics of animals hide knowledge for biologists to find. Science is used a fortiori as a tool to understand human beings in the human sciences.
In part three (“The Three Models”), Foucault explores the three primary areas of the human sciences. These three areas are each based exclusively on biology, philology, and economics. Psychology is based in biology; sociology is based in economics; literary studies is based in philology. From these three sciences, human sciences borrow pairs of concepts: Functions and norms from biology, conflict and rule from economics, and significations and systems of signage from philology. These concepts are foundational to all human sciences, though some may use more than others: For example, literary studies rely more on significations and systems of signage. These concepts serve as bridges between science and the human sciences for examining humans through the lens of science.
In part four (“Psychoanalysis and Ethnology”), Foucault examines the privileged place given to psychoanalysis and ethnology in the human sciences. The two are “inexhaustible treasure-hoards” for the human sciences. Psychoanalysis, the study of the subconscious, opens up the unthought as material for producing knowledge. Ethnography, the study of individual cultures, opens up human historicity as an object of knowledge as well. All human sciences rely on these two areas of study. The two are fundamental for making inferences about an individual based on a culture, or vice versa.
In part six (“In Conclusion”), Foucault speculates on the future. He believes that the shaky, self-reflexive basis of knowledge that the human sciences are built on is bound to give way to a new episteme. Western thought will, one day, look on our ways of thinking as just as strange and outdated as we see the Classical Age’s ways of thinking. Foucault believes this change will come with the disappearance of “man,” since “man” exists only in the episteme of the era.
Chapter 10 Analysis
Chapter 10 is the focal point of The Order of Things. Every analysis, case study, and concept explored was in order to examine the human sciences. Foucault had to establish the archaeology of the knowledge of the sciences of life, labor, and language because the human sciences use these sciences as tools. This required tracing the invention of these sciences back to the Classical Age to understand how the human sciences of modernity function. The archaeology of knowledge relies on an expansive web of context in order to examine a particular object. This is similar to how an actual archaeologist needs to understand the context in which an artefact was found to examine the artefact.
Foucault, like modern archaeologists, does not privilege one episteme (culture) over another. Foucault believes our episteme will disappear “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (422), much like how an archaeologist understands that cultures come and go—none of them are privileged and permanent above all others. For Foucault, these changes are never “the liberation of an old anxiety” (422) about the truth of knowledge, but a fundamental change in how knowledge is arranged and understood. No knowledge is valued as the “real” knowledge over other forms of knowledge by the archaeologist of knowledge.
Foucault’s methodology has a profound conclusion: Everything we know is situational and will give way to different forms of knowledge in the future. Waking up from the “Anthropological Sleep” requires a destruction of the idea of the unthought, which structures our current understanding of what it means to be human. Foucault believes Nietzsche’s philosophy is a herald of the coming change. Nietzsche believes that “the death of God and the last man are engaged in a contest with more than one round” which will lead to “the explosion of man’s face in laughter, and the return of masks” (420). Nietzsche’s death of God implies an ideological shift in what it means to be a human, swapping our “real” faces for masks. Foucault’s use of “dogmatism” in reference to anthropology gives anthropology a position similar to God; becoming something new means doing away with an over-reliance on the basis of the human sciences. Nietzsche’s philosophy is what Foucault works to support with The Order of Things.
Foucault does not assert these things as a wish for the future. Instead, he is trying to predict where the archaeology of knowledge might lead and how future generations will look back on our own episteme. Foucault predicts that any change in episteme rests on the lynchpin of modern ideas of humanity and the unthought.
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