OUT OF THEIR DEPTHS: “MORAL KINDS” AND THE INTERPRETATION OF EVIDENCE IN FOUCAULT'S MODERN EPISTEME

Abstract

ABSTRACTMichel Foucault's The Order of Things is uniquely relevant to historians because it is about the contradictions of writing history in the present day, and because it makes claims absent from other books often seen as similar, such as Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For Order, the present‐day modern episteme is characterized by unconscious elements that connect Man through time. These unconscious elements are only vaguely discernible to himself and are deformed in the process of representation, that is, by putting experience into words. At the same time, history‐writing presumes to pull these unconscious elements out of the depths of human experience, time, and space. These assumptions create contradictions for historians in the present day and warrant particular interpretations of evidence that override alternative plausible interpretations. The inescapable contradictions of writing history in the modern episteme are most apparent in histories of what philosopher Ian Hacking calls “moral kinds,” as shown by an extended analysis of a recent history article on medical experimentation on prisoners. The overarching aim of this essay is to identify stronger, weaker, and usefully plausible interpretations of historical evidence—and, inspired by Foucault, to extend the imaginative possibilities for writing history.