Thoughts on The Order of Things

[sodapopinski51]

The discourse of "Man," as in Rights of Man, Liberal Humanism, and The Human Sciences began when the Classical Period ended. The entire book is primarily about this transition, and how subsequent philosophers are indebted to this transition. While the book reads like a History of Philosophy, very few sources are cited. Rarely is a footnote given,

Comments

[sodapopinski51]

Yes, I agree with what you said completely. The aspect of the text that I overlooked when I first read it (I'm now reading it for a second time closely) is the Doxic subversion you mentioned. An episteme is popularized by doxa. For instance, the classical period Foucault studies was the prevalent episteme in the late 16-late 18th century. A certain epistemological construction, a limit to the knowable, was occurring, a horizon of the thinkable, yet the doxa, the common folk, absorbed these ideas without really knowing they were doing so. So this raises all sorts of complex questions regarding Freedom, free-will, agency, so on and so forth.
People superficially believe that they freely choose their ideology, moral positions, political beliefs, etc. but what Foucault shows that is brilliant is that there is really no such thing as "Free-Will" in the sense of choosing an ideology. The episteme that is predominant at your historical conjuncture is the horizon of what you think and believe. The idea of an essentialized Individuality is actually a historical construction of Liberal Humanism, the period that happened right after Classical thought was in the decline. So "I am unique" is actually a product of a certain historical period. In fact, nobody is unique in their beliefs, our morals are historically constructed through the circulation of knowledge by various overlapping epistemes.

Today, I think but I'm not certain about this, the pre-dominant episteme in Western Culture is the Post-Modern Condition. I'm not certain because I cannot necessarily know this... But I assume it to be so even though there are overlapping epistemes vying for hegemony (Neo-Conservatism, Liberalism, Humanism, Evangelical Christianity, Marxism, etc.) Discourse is always a heterogeneous bricolage.