Anthropologized science

Foucault, in Canguilhem’s summary, argues that an anthropologization of the sciences took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when Kantian philosophy combined with biology, economics, and linguistics to raise the question What is Man? Foucault argues: “From the moment when life, work, and language ceased to be attributes of a nature and became natures themselves, rooted in their specific history, natures at whose intersection man discovers himself natured, that is, both supported and contained, then empirical sciences of all natures are constituted as specific sciences of the product of these natures, thus of man.”

If this is right, then the seeds of the future destruction of “Man” are already contained here, for this modern Humanism had already reduced Man to an intersection point of independent histories. Likewise for the Kantian subject, which is “like the transcendental object of experience . . . an unknown.” Kant’s “I” “cannot know itself as Myself.”