302
MAN IS AN
INVENTION OF
RECENT DATE
MICHEL FOUCAULT (1926–1984)
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
EpistemologyAPPROACH
Discursive archaeologyBEFORE
Late 18th century Immanuel
Kant lays the foundation for the
19th-century model of “man.”1859 Charles Darwin’s On
the Origin of Species causes
a revolution in how we
understand ourselves.1883 Friedrich Nietzsche,
in Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
announces that man is
something to be surpassed.AFTER
1991 Daniel Dennett’s
Consciousness Explained
calls into question many of
our most cherished notions
about consciousness.1991 American philosopher
Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg
Manifesto attempts to imagine
a post-human future.T
he idea that man is an
invention of recent date
appears in The Order of
Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences by French
philosopher Michel Foucault. To
understand what Foucault means
by this, we need to know what he
means by archaeology, and why he
thinks that we should apply it
to the history of thought.
Foucault is interested in how
our discourse—the way in which
we talk and think about things—
is formed by a set of largely
unconscious rules that arise out of
the historical conditions in whichwe find ourselves. What we take to
be the “common sense” background
to how we think and talk about the
world is in fact shaped by these rules
and these conditions. However, the
rules and conditions change over
time, and consequently so do our
discourses. For this reason, an
“archaeology” is needed to unearth
both the limits and the conditions
of how people thought and talked
about the world in previous ages.
We cannot take concepts that we
use in our present context (for
example, the concept of “human
nature”) and assume that they are
somehow eternal, and that all weBut an archaeology of our
thinking shows that the idea
of “man” arose as an object of
study at the beginning
of the 19th century.We treat the idea
of “man” or humankind
as if it is a natural
and eternal idea.Man is an
invention of
recent date.