Historicizing and Language

Foucault's stylistic approach to his Introduction to Kant's Anthropology reveals how committed he is to historicizing Kant's text. As he shows how the text interacts with the Copernican revolution, the influence of the Kantian system on medicine, Kant's own many years of teaching his class on Anthropology as he was writing his critiques, as well as the intellectual exchanges with Beck, Schutz, and Hufeland, Foucault is able to access Kant's work in a highly contextualized way.

This approach produces a critique that works on multiple levels. Most importantly, it dissects the historical circumstance of the Anthropology to reveal how Kant undercuts his argument for the a priori existence of the capacity for understanding in each individual through the transcental illusion, namely, the sleight of hand in thinking that the idea of human finitude is natural rather than our own retroactive reconstruction. However, Foucault believes the structure of the mind that Kant describes in the Critique is still valid in the Anthropology--only that now we must forget trying to get back and some originary or a priori, but enact it in the "temporal dimension," which is necessarily mediated by language. Here is the origins for Foucault's notion that what can be considered "knowledge" must be communicated between people through language. Language then becomes all-important in the construction of Foucault's notion of the "episteme" or discourse.

I also think that his conclusion with the Nietzschean gesture is very intriguing--I haven't read The Order of Things but I believe that argument is better elaborated in the latter work....