The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher born in 1844. His writing was largely unknown in his lifetime but became a pillar of 20th-century philosophy. Nietzsche was concerned with the “death of God” that the 19th-century episteme made possible with its focus on empiricism and scientific methodology. Nietzsche predicted that the “death of God” would lead to the death of humanity as it existed in his time. The void left behind by the death of God and humanity would have to be filled by the “superhuman,” a shift in humanity that would find new ways to structure human lives untethered from the Christian roots of Europe. Nietzsche also conceptualized the “eternal return,” the idea that history will forever repeat itself in loops rather than a straight line leading towards better and better progress.

Foucault viewed Nietzsche as more of a philologist than a philosopher. For Foucault, Nietzsche’s claim that “man” would soon be replaced by the “superman” (in German, the Übermensch) is a statement on the place of language within Western culture (351). This reinforces Foucault’s claim that the death of man is a linguistic act that signals shifting values and views on what it means to be a human in the world (373). Nietzsche’s eternal return set fire to previous ideas about history and cultural development because, like Foucault’s idea of the episteme, it makes ideas of objective progress and perfection impossible in a historical sense. If everything is doomed to repeat eternally, then nothing is improving over the course of history. These two ideas—the death of man and the eternal return—are vital to Foucault’s understandings of history, knowledge, and power.

Carl Linnaeus (sometimes called Carl von Linné later in life) was a Swedish natural historian born in 1707. His chief interests included botany, taxonomy, and zoology. Linnaeus formalized the binomial nomenclature that is still in use in biology. Linnaeus, like the general grammarians of his time, viewed Latin as the root of European languages. He employed Latin in his binomial nomenclature because the language’s functions were already highly taxonomized by the general grammarians, and thus viewed as a neutral vehicle for scientific knowledge.

Linnaeus encapsulates many of the traits of the Classical episteme that Foucault wishes to highlight. Linnaeus’s most important work, Systema Naturae (1735), codified the binomial nomenclature taxonomy that many of the era were already using in some way. In it, he taxonomizes roughly 10,000 species, with significantly more plants classified than animals, reinforcing Foucault’s claim that taxonomists focused on taxonomizing plants. Linnaeus, particularly where plants are concerned, admits his taxonomies are at times completely arbitrary, yet they are convenient groupings and therefore significant for taxonomizing knowledge (42). Linnaeus is Foucault’s paradigm for the Classical episteme.