THE EMPIRICAL AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL
By Michel Foucault

Man, in the analytic of finitude, is a strange empirico-transcendental doublet, since he is a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible. But did not the human nature of the eighteenth-century empiricists play the same role? In fact, what was being analysed then was the properties and forms of representation which made knowledge in general possible (it was thus that Condillac defined the necessary and sufficient operations for representation to deploy itself as knowledge: reminiscence, self-consciousness, imagination, memory); now that the site of the analysis is no longer representation but man in his finitude, it is a question of revealing the conditions of knowledge on the basis of the empirical contents given in it. It is of little importance, for the general movement of modern thought, where these contents hap­pened to be localized: knowing whether they were sought in introspec­tion or in other forms of analysis is not the point. For the threshold of our modernity is situated not by the attempt to apply objective methods to the study of man, but rather by the constitution of an empirico-trans­cendental doublet which was called man. Two kinds of analysis then came into being. There are those that operate within the space of the body, and - by studying perception, sensorial mechanisms, neuro-motor diagrams, and the articulation common to things and to the organism -function as a sort of transcendental aesthetic; these led to the discovery that knowledge has anatomo-physiological conditions, that it is formed gradually within the structures of the body, that it may have a privileged place within it, but that its forms cannot be dissociated from its peculiar functioning; in short, that there is a nature of human knowledge that determines its forms and that can at the same time be made manifest to it in its own empirical contents. There were also analyses that - by study­ing humanity's more or less ancient, more or less easily vanquished illusions - functioned as a sort of transcendental dialectic; by this means it was shown that knowledge had historical, social, or economic con­ditions, that it was formed within the relations that are woven between men, and that it was not independent of the particular form they might take here or there; in short, that there was a history of human know­ledge which could both be given to empirical knowledge and prescribe its forms.

Now, these analyses have this in particular about them: they apparently do not need one another in any way; moreover, they can dispense with the need for an analytic (or a theory of the subject): they claim to be able to rest entirely on themselves, since it is the contents themselves that function as transcendental reflection. But in fact the search for a nature or a history of knowledge, in the movement by which the dimension proper to a critique is fitted over the contents of empirical knowledge, already presupposes the use of a certain critique - a critique that is not the exercise of pure reflection, but the result of a series of more or less obscure divisions. And, in the first place, these divisions are relatively clearly elucidated, even though they are arbitrary: the division that dis­tinguishes rudimentary, imperfect, unequal, emergent knowledge from knowledge that may be called, if not complete, at least constituted in its stable and definitive forms (this division makes possible the study of the natural conditions of knowledge); the division that distinguishes illusion from truth, the ideological fantasy from the scientific theory (this division makes possible the study of the historical conditions of knowledge); but there is a more obscure and more fundamental division: that of truth itself; there must, in fact, exist a truth that is of the same order as the object-the truth that is gradually outlined, formed, stabilized, and expressed through the body and the rudiments of perception; the truth that appears as illusions are dissipated, and as history establishes a disalienated status for itself; but there must also exist a truth that is of the order of discourse - a truth that makes it possible to. employ, when dealing with the nature or history of knowledge, a language that will be true. It is the status of this true discourse that remains ambiguous. These two things lead to one conclusion: either this true discourse finds its founda­tion and model in the empirical truth whose genesis in nature and in history it retraces, so that one has an analysis of the positivist type (the truth of the object determines the truth of the discourse that describes its formation); or the true discourse anticipates the truth whose nature and history it defines; it sketches it out in advance and foments it from a dis­tance, so that one has a discourse of the eschatological type (the truth of the philosophical discourse constitutes the truth in formation). In fact, it is a question not so much of an alternative as of a fluctuation inherent in all analysis, which brings out the value of the empirical at the transcen­dental level. Comte and Marx both bear out the fact that eschatology (as the objective truth proceeding from man's discourse) and positivism (as the truth of discourse defined on the basis of the truth of the object) are archaeologically indissociable: a discourse attempting to be both empirical and critical cannot but be both positivist and eschatological; man appears within it as a truth both reduced and promised. Pre-critical naivete holds undivided rule.

This is why modem thought has been unable to avoid - and precisely from the starting-point of this naive discourse - searching for the locus of a discourse that would be neither of the order of reduction nor of the order of promise: a discourse whose tension would keep separate the empirical and the transcendental, while being directed at both; a discourse that would make it possible to analyse man as a subject, that is, as a locus of knowledge which has been empirically acquired but referred back as closely as possible to what makes it possible, and as a pure form immediately present to those contents; a discourse, in short, which in relation to to quasi-aesthetics and quasi-dialectics would play the role of an analytic which would at the same time give them a foundation in a theory of the subject and perhaps enable them to articulate themselves in that third and intermediary term in which both the experience of the body and that of culture would be rooted. Such a complex, over-determined, and neces­sary role has been performed in modem thought by the analysis of actual expel ience. Actual experience is, in fact, both the space in which all empirical contents arc given to experience and the original form that makes them possible in general and designates their primary roots; it does indeed provide a means of communication between the space of the body and the time of culture, between the determinations of nature and the weight of history, but only on condition that the body, and, through it, nature, should first be posited in the experience of an irreducible spatiality, and that culture, the carrier of history, should be experienced first of all in the immediacy of its sedimented significations. It is easy enough to understand how the analysis of actual experience has established itself, in modern reflection, as a radical contestation of positivism and eschatology; how it has tried to restore the forgotten dimension of the transcendental; how it has attempted to exorcise the naive discourse of a truth reduced wholly to the empirical, and the prophetic discourse which with similar naivete promises at last the eventual attainment by man of experience. Nevertheless, the analysis of actual experience is a discourse of mixed nature: it is directed to a specific yet ambiguous stratum, concrete enough for it to be possible to apply to it a meticulous and descriptive language, yet sufficiently removed from the positivity of things for it to be possible, from that starting-point, to escape from that naivete, to contest it and seek foundations for it. This analysis seeks to articulate the possible objectivity of a knowledge of nature upon the original experience of which the body provides an outline; and to articulate the possible history of a culture upon the semantic density which is both hidden and revealed in actual experience. It is doing no more, then, than fulfilling with greater care the hasty demands laid down when the attempt was made to make the empirical, in man, stand for the transcendental. Despite appearances to the contrary, it is evident how closely knit is the network that links thoughts of the positivist or eschatological type (Marxism being in the first rank of these) and reflections inspired by phenomenology. Their recent rapprochement is not of the order of a tardy reconciliation: at the level of archaeological configurations they were both necessary - and necessary to one another - from the moment the anthropological postu­late was constituted, that is, from the moment when man appeared as an empirico-transcendental doublet.

The true contestation of positivism and eschatology does not lie, therefore, in a return to actual experience (which rather, in fact, provides them with confirmation by giving them roots); but if such a contestation could be made, it would be from the starting-point of a question which may well seem aberrant, so opposed is it to what has rendered the whole of our thought historically possible. This question would be: Does man really exist? To imagine, for an instant, what the world and thought and truth might be if man did not exist, is considered to be merely indulging in paradox. This is because we are so blinded by the recent manifestation of man that we can no longer remember a time - and it is not so long ago - when the world, its order, and human beings existed, but man did not. It is easy to see why Nietzsche's thought should have had, and still has for us, such a disturbing power when it introduced in the form of an imminent event, the Promise-Threat, the notion that man would soon be no more - but would be replaced by the superman; in a philosophy of the Return, this meant that man had long since disappeared and would con­tinue to disappear, and that our modern thought about man, our concern for him, our humanism, were all sleeping serenely over the threatening rumble of his non-existence. Ought we not to remind ourselves - we who believe ourselves bound to a finitude which belongs only to us, and which opens up the truth of the world to us by means of our cognition -ought we not to remind ourselves that we are bound to the back of a tiger?

Excerpt from:
The Order of Things
By Michel Foucault
VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 1994
Copyright © 1970 by Random House, Inc
ISBN 0-679-75335-4