The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

Chapter 5: “Classifying” applies the principles of Chapter 3 to natural history, the Classical Age’s equivalent to biology. Foucault examines several different aspects of natural history to uncover the discipline’s relationship to representation. Like general grammar, natural history lays a transparent mesh of words and taxonomy over the things to be known (animals and plants in this case instead of words). The chapter is split into seven parts.

In part one (“What the Historians Say”), Foucault differentiates his approach from that of historians. Historians examine the conflict between ideas and competing theories on different subjects in the development of science. These examinations create narratives about the evolution of ideas that tend towards progress. Foucault is not interested in examining the conflicts of ideas, thoughts, and opinions within the episteme. Instead, he wants to know what makes the ideas, thoughts, and opinions present within a conflict into intelligible positions that one can take within a culture.

In part two (“Natural History”), Foucault unpacks the discipline and what it meant in the Classical Age. Natural history was a scientific exploration of the natural world through observable, quantifiable structures. Zoos and botanical gardens became increasingly popular in the Classical Age because they spatially grouped these objects for observation. The taxonomy of natural history was meant to represent the continuity of life.

In part three (“Structure”), Foucault examines the mechanisms of natural history, beginning with the concept of structure. Natural history needed to subjugate language to the realm of neutral observation, so all senses were excluded from the science of natural history except for vision. There were four elements that were the core of observation: form, quantity of parts, the distribution of the parts, and the magnitude of the parts. These four elements created the structure of the taxonomic tables.

In part four (“Character”), Foucault pinpoints natural history’s relationship with representation. The descriptions provided by structure were akin to proper nouns for an organism. These structures represented the organism’s character. The character of an organism was the essence that separated it from other organisms. For example, what separates a cat from a dog or porcupine is the cat’s character. The structure of observation was a way of making the senses (and language) neutral and analytic in describing an organism’s character.

In part five (“Continuity and Catastrophe”), Foucault looks at how knowledge can be stabilized for taxonomies to exist. In order for everything to be analyzed and placed into tables, knowledge about them has to remain stable in order to keep the tables together. Natural historians conceptualized the history of organisms as an “uninterrupted gradation of values” (159). Ideas about fixism (a theory that rejects evolution, positing that the present-day forms of species are the forms they always had) and evolution began in the Classical Age as ways of explaining the continuities between different types of creatures, such as different species of birds. Natural historians theorized time as a simple flow from one event to the next, where catastrophes might happen to wipe out species or make them converge. This continuity provided a stable base for taxonomy to rest upon.

In part six (“Monster and Fossils”), Foucault looks at how the continuity established in the previous part addresses fossil records. The taxonomic tables kept their shape over temporal shifts in the fossil record because of the ideas of Charles Bonnet. All species were thought to progress towards perfection, which would keep the taxonomic tables stable over time. Foucault calls any aberrations in the fossil record “monsters,” which were used as examples to show the continuity of the species that outlived the “monster.”

In part seven (“The Discourse of Nature”), Foucault brings together all of the aspects of natural history discussed in the chapter. Foucault argues that the theory of natural history cannot be separated from the theory of language in the Classical Age, since taxonomy and description of organisms requires language. Natural history, like general grammar, orders things in a fundamental arrangement and represents them with systemic naming in order to generate knowledge. Foucault calls the underlying ideas and assumptions that allow general grammar and natural history to function the “historical a priori” (172) of the era.