I chose the book “The Order of Things” and the second part of Chapter 5 for analysis.
NATURAL HISTORY｜CLASSFYING
How was the Classical age able to define this realm of ‘natural history’, the proofs and even the unity of which now appear to us so distant, and as though already blurred? What is this field in which nature appeared sufficiently close to itself for the individual beings it contained to be classified, and yet so far removed from itself that they had to be so by the medium of analysis and reflection? One has the impression – and it is often expressed – that the history of nature must have appeared as Cartesian mechanism ebbed. When it had at last become clear that it was impossible to fit the entire world into the laws of rectilinear movement, when the complexity of the vegetable and animal kingdoms had sufficiently resisted the simple forms of extended substance, then it became necessary for nature to manifest itself in all its strange richness; and the meticulous observation of living beings was thus born upon the empty strand from which Cartesianism had just withdrawn. Unfortunately, things do not happen as simply as that. It is quite possible – though it would be a matter requiring careful scrutiny – that one science can arise out of another; but no science can be generated by the absence of another, or from another’s failure, or even from some obstacle another has encountered. In fact, the possibility of natural history, with Ray, Jonston, Christophorus Knauth, is contemporaneous with Cartesianism itself, and not with its failure. Mechanism from Descartes to d’Alembert and natural history from Tournefort to Daubenton were authorized by the same episteme. For natural history to appear, it was not necessary for nature to become denser and more obscure, to multiply its mechanisms to the point of acquiring the opaque weight of a history that can only be retraced and described, without any possibility of measuring it, calculating it, or explaining it; it was necessary – and this is entirely the opposite – for History to become Natural. In the sixteenth century, and right up to the middle of the seventeenth, all that existed was histories: Belon had written a History of the nature of birds; Duret, an Admirable history of plants; Aldrovandi, a History of serpents and dragons. In 1657, Jonston published a Natural history of quadrupeds. This date of birth is not, of course, absolutely definitive;1 it is there only to symbolize a landmark, and to indicate, from afar, the apparent enigma of an event. This event is the sudden separation, in the realm of Historia, of two orders of knowledge henceforward to be considered different. Until the time of Aldrovandi, History was the inextricable and completely unitary fabric of all that was visible of things and of the signs that had been discovered or lodged in them: to write the history of a plant or an animal was as much a matter of describing its elements or organs as of describing the resemblances that could be found in it, the virtues that it was thought to possess, the legends and stories with which it had been involved, its place in heraldry, the medicaments that were concocted from its substance, the foods it provided, what the ancients recorded of it, and what travellers might have said of it. The history of a living being was that being itself, within the whole semantic network that connected it to the world. The division, so evident to us, between what we see, what others have observed and handed down, and what others imagine or naïvely believe, the great tripartition, apparently so simple and so immediate, into Observation, Document, and Fable, did not exist. And this was not because science was hesitating between a rational vocation and the vast weight of naïve tradition, but for the much more precise and much more constraining reason that signs were then part of things themselves, whereas in the seventeenth century they become modes of representation. When Jonston wrote his Natural history of quadrupeds, did he know any more about them than Aldrovandi did, a half-century earlier? Not a great deal more, the historians assure us. But that is not the question. Or, if we must pose it in these terms, then we must reply that Jonston knew a great deal less than Aldrovandi. The latter, in the case of each animal he examined, offered the reader, and on the same level, a description of its anatomy and of the methods of capturing it; its allegorical uses and mode of generation; its habitat and legendary mansions; its food and the best ways of cooking its flesh. Jonston subdivides his chapter on the horse under twelve headings: name, anatomical parts, habitat, ages, generation, voice, movements, sympathy and antipathy, uses, medicinal uses.2 None of this was omitted by Aldrovandi, and he gives us a great deal more besides. The essential difference lies in what is missing in Jonston. The whole of animal semantics has disappeared, like a dead and useless limb. The words that had been interwoven in the very being of the beast have been unravelled and removed: and the living being, in its anatomy, its form, its habits, its birth and death, appears as though stripped naked. Natural history finds its locus in the gap that is now opened up between things and words – a silent gap, pure of all verbal sedimentation, and yet articulated according to the elements of representation, those same elements that can now without let or hindrance be named. Things touch against the banks of discourse because they appear in the hollow space of representation. It is not therefore at the moment when one gives up calculation that one finally begins to observe. We must not see the constitution of natural history, with the empirical climate in which it develops, as an experiment forcing entry, willy-nilly, into a knowledge that was keeping watch on the truth of nature elsewhere; natural history – and this is why it appeared at precisely this moment – is the space opened up in representation by an analysis which is anticipating the possibility of naming; it is the possibility of seeing what one will be able to say, but what one could not say subsequently, or see at a distance, if things and words, distinct from one another, did not, from the very first, communicate in a representation. The descriptive order proposed for natural history by Linnaeus, long after Jonston, is very characteristic. According to this order, every chapter dealing with a given animal should follow the following plan: name, theory, kind, species, attributes, use, and, to conclude, Litteraria. All the language deposited upon things by time is pushed back into the very last category, like a sort of supplement in which discourse is allowed to recount itself and record discoveries, traditions, beliefs, and poetical figures. Before this language of language, it is the thing itself that appears, in its own characters, but within the reality that has been patterned from the very outset by the name. The constitution of a natural science in the classical age is not the effect, either direct or indirect, of the transference of a rationality formed elsewhere (for geometrical or mechanical purposes). It is a separate formation, one that has its own archaeology, even though it is linked (though in a correlative and simultaneous mode) to the general theory of signs and to the project for a universal mathesis. Thus the old word ‘history’ changes its value, and perhaps rediscovers one of its archaic significations. In any case, though it is true that the historian, for the Greeks, was indeed the individual who sees and who recounts from the starting-point of his sight, it has not always been so in our culture. Indeed, it was at a relatively late date, on the threshold of the Classical age, that he assumed – or resumed – this role. Until the mid-seventeenth century, the historian’s task was to establish the great compilation of documents and signs – of everything, throughout the world, that might form a mark, as it were. It was the historian’s responsibility to restore to language all the words that had been buried. His existence was defined not so much by what he saw as by what he retold, by a secondary speech which pronounced afresh so many words that had been muffled. The Classical age gives history a quite different meaning: that of undertaking a meticulous examination of things themselves for the first time, and then of transcribing what it has gathered in smooth, neutralized, and faithful words. It is understandable that the first form of history constituted in this period of ‘purification’ should have been the history of nature. For its construction requires only words applied, without intermediary, to things themselves. The documents of this new history are not other words, texts or records, but unencumbered spaces in which things are juxtaposed: herbariums, collections, gardens; the locus of this history is a non-temporal rectangle in which, stripped of all commentary, of all enveloping language, creatures present themselves one beside another, their surfaces visible, grouped according to their common features, and thus already virtually analysed, and bearers of nothing but their own individual names. It is often said that the establishment of botanical gardens and zoological collections expressed a new curiosity about exotic plants and animals. In fact, these had already claimed men’s interest for a long while. What had changed was the space in which it was possible to see them and from which it was possible to describe them. To the Renaissance, the strangeness of animals was a spectacle: it was featured in fairs, in tournaments, in fictitious or real combats, in reconstitutions of legends in which the bestiary displayed its ageless fables. The natural history room and the garden, as created in the Classical period, replace the circular procession of the ‘show’ with the arrangement of things in a ‘table’. What came surreptitiously into being between the age of the theatre and that of the catalogue was not the desire for knowledge, but a new way of connecting things both to the eye and to discourse. A new way of making history. We also know what methodological importance these ‘natural’ allocations assumed, at the end of the eighteenth century, in the classification of words, languages, roots, documents, records – in short, in the constitution of a whole environment of history (in the now familiar sense of the word) in which the nineteenth century was to rediscover, after this pure tabulation of things, the renewed possibility of talking about words. And of talking about them, not in the style of commentary, but in a mode that was to be considered as positive, as objective, as that of natural history. The ever more complete preservation of what was written, the establishment of archives, then of filing systems for them, the reorganization of libraries, the drawing up of catalogues, indexes, and inventories, all these things represent, at the end of the Classical age, not so much a new sensitivity to time, to its past, to the density of history, as a way of introducing into the language already imprinted on things, and into the traces it has left, an order of the same type as that which was being established between living creatures. And it is in this classified time, in this squared and spatialized development, that the historians of the nineteenth century were to undertake the creation of a history that could at last be ‘true’ – in other words, liberated from Classical rationality, from its ordering and theodicy: a history restored to the irruptive violence of time.
Michel Foucault, ‘Preface’, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, [1966] 1989
Catalogue
1. Historical Contextualization
Classical Age Definition
Cartesian Mechanism’s Decline
Science Emergence Conditions
2. Epistemic Foundations
Episteme Definition
Nature-History Distinction
Knowledge Authorization
3. Historiography of Science
Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Histories
Jonston’s “Natural History of Quadrupeds”
Natural History’s Birthdate Symbolism
4. Transitional Knowledge
Historia’s Dichotomy
Document, Observation, Fable Tripartition
Sign-Thing Integration and Separation
5. Natural History Characteristics
Jonston vs. Aldrovandi’s Methodology
Language and Representation
Descriptive Order
6.Semantics and Classification
Animal Semantics Loss
Linnaeus’s Descriptive Order
Language-Layer Reclassification
7. Knowledge Formation Process
Things-Words Gap
Representation’s Role
Naming and Seeing Correlation
8. Historical and Knowledge Shift
Historian’s Role Evolution
Purification Period’s ‘History’
9. Material Culture of Knowledge
Collections, Herbariums, Gardens
Space of Representation
10. Perception and Representation Shifts
From Spectacle to Classification
Show to Table Transition
11. Methodology and Classification
Words and Language Classification
Archives and Catalogues
12. Temporal and Spatial Orders
Historical True/False Dichotomy
Rationality and Order
Historiography in the Nineteenth Century
A Distilled Reconstruction of Natural History According to Foucault
In the landscape of intellectual thought that defines the Classical period, the concept of ‘natural history’ emerges as a distinct and refined field of study, tracing its roots back to the waning influence of Cartesianism. This period witnessed the metamorphosis of historia from a generalised tapestry woven with legends and anatomical facts into a disciplined inquiry that shed its anecdotal veneer. This crucial shift was exemplified in the work of natural historians such as Jonston, who departed from predecessors such as Aldrovandi by eschewing the allegorical and embracing the empirical.
As the focus turned away from the Cartesian quest for abstract categorisation, natural history found fertile ground in the representation of the observable world. The clarity of this representation did not come from the void left by withdrawn calculation, but from a harmonisation of sight and language. It was Linnaeus who, with his taxonomic brilliance, further refined this field by constructing a lexical hierarchy that placed the tangible before the terminological, representation before discourse.
The evolution of observational practices from botanical gardens to detailed catalogues reflects this transformative period. What were once collections of natural curiosities for leisurely spectacle became subjects of meticulous visual and verbal order. This was a move from display to systematic documentation, an alignment with the Classical age’s drive towards categorisation.
This drive did not stop at living specimens, but extended to the organisation of knowledge itself. The archival impulse of the Classical Age, manifested in the meticulous structuring of libraries and records, reflected a broader analytical temperament that saw the natural world as a collection to be classified and understood. This systematic approach was the foundation upon which the objective historical accounts of the nineteenth century were built. It was a history now detached from classical rationalism, ready to grapple with the unknown dynamics of temporal existence.
Foucault’s examination of ‘natural history’ within the classical epoch thus underscores a paradigmatic transition: from a seamless blend of myth and reality to structured empirical analysis. This transition is the cornerstone of the intellectual framework of the classical age, redefining how humanity perceived and catalogued the complexities of the natural world.