Academic Questions

MICHEL Foucault opens his book The Order of Things with a paragraph that has become one of his most famous. Foucault describes a passage from “a certain Chinese encyclopedia” that, he claims, breaks up all the ordered surfaces of our thoughts. By “our” thoughts, he means Western thought in the modern era. The encyclopedia divides animals into the following categories: “a) belonging to the Emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in the present classification, i) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, l) et cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies.” Foucault writes that, thanks to “the wonderment of this taxonomy,” we can apprehend not only “the exotic charm of another system of thought” but also “the limitation of our own.” What the taxonomy or form of classification reveals, says Foucault, is that “there would appear to be, then, at the other extremity of the earth we inhabit, a culture . . . that does not distribute the multiplicity of existing things into any of the categories that make it possible for us to name, speak and think.” The stark impossibility of our thinking in this way, Foucault says, demonstrates the existence of an entirely different system of rationality.

In May 1995 I gave a paper to a seminar in the Department of History at the University of Sydney, Australia. Although most of the postmodernists in the department declined to attend, they deputized one of their number, Alastair MacLachlan, to reply and, they hoped, to tear me apart. My respondent opened his remarks by citing Foucault and the Chinese taxonomy. Didn’t I realize, he chided, that other cultures have such dramatically different conceptual schemes that traditional assumptions of Western historiography are inadequate for the task of understanding them?

KW

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Keith Windschuttle

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MICHEL Foucault opens his book The Order of Things with a paragraph that has become one of his most famous. Foucault describes a passage from “a certain Chinese encyclopedia” that, he claims, breaks up all the ordered surfaces of our thoughts. By “our” thoughts, he means Western thought in the modern era. The encyclopedia divides animals into the following categories: “a) belonging to the Emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in the present classification, i) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, l) et cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies.” Foucault writes that, thanks to “the wonderment of this taxonomy,” we can apprehend not only “the exotic charm of another system of thought” but also “the limitation of our own.” What the taxonomy or form of classification reveals, says Foucault, is that “there would appear to be, then, at the other extremity of the earth we inhabit, a culture . . . that does not distribute the multiplicity of existing things into any of the categories that make it possible for us to name, speak and think.” The stark impossibility of our thinking in this way, Foucault says, demonstrates the existence of an entirely different system of rationality.

In May 1995 I gave a paper to a seminar in the Department of History at the University of Sydney, Australia. Although most of the postmodernists in the department declined to attend, they deputized one of their number, Alastair MacLachlan, to reply and, they hoped, to tear me apart. My respondent opened his remarks by citing Foucault and the Chinese taxonomy. Didn’t I realize, he chided, that other cultures have such dramatically different conceptual schemes that traditional assumptions of Western historiography are inadequate for the task of understanding them?