Modern Episteme—The Being In Whose Being Comes Into Question

From The Perspective Of The Human Spirit's Pursuit Of Liberation Things Look
Different

In the modern episteme difference asserts its right against sameness in truth.
In so far as everything is seen to be carrying within itself some "hidden
truth," the search for truth characterizes the modern episteme. Since everything can
be reduced to its constituent parts an elementaristic attitude prevails in this
episteme. Formalization takes the place of representation and man becomes the
being in whose being being comes into question. The being of man becomes the
"shared being" of questioners. For Foucault, at the crossroads of the classic
and modern episteme stands Descartes, but the truly modern break with the
classic episteme came with the Kantian perspective on man and nature. In Kant's
philosophy the classical episteme becomes reduced to a mere metaphysic. In “The
Order of Things” Foucault writes:

"The Kantian critique...questions representation, not in accordance with the
endless movement that proceeds from the simple element to all its possible
combinations, but on the basis of its rightful limits. Thus it sanctions for the
first time that event in European culture which coincides with the end of the
eighteenth century: the withdrawal of knowledge and thought outside the space of
representation. That space is brought into question in its foundation, its
origin and its limits: and by this very fact, the unlimited field of
representation, which Classical thought had established, which Ideology had
attempted to scan in accordance with a step-by-step, discursive, scientific
method, now appears as a metaphysics. [Alan Sheridan, The Will To Truth, 1980,
p. 68]

As is readily apparent, on Foucault's reading, the classical episteme provided
no place for man to engage in his "search for man." In the classical episteme
truth was an already determined relationship. It was, in its multivariate
diversity, one's relationship to God: "In the classical age the truth of a thing
was defined by its position in the table of representations, which was
constructed to mirror God's Order--itself an order of the visible." [Romand
Coles, 1992, p. 67] This order was not one of a Godless world in which man is the sovereign subject for all possible knowledge; rather, it was the visible order of an organic, holistic universe where there was no need for a differentiated locus of knowledge, there was simply the "knowledge of the order of things."

This "knowledge of the order of things," however, became integrated in people
who had economic needs to satisfy and as conditions changed, e.g., centralized
monarchy, urban expansion, birth of guilds, etc., people created for themselves
less restrictive lifestyles. In this process the scientific revolution played a
significant role. Eventually, the holistic, God-centered universe of the Middle
Ages gave ground to the matter-centered, self-centered universe of today. If we
are to understand this event as something more than the latest development of
Foucault's power/knowledge driven modern episteme we must turn our attention to
a description of what Ernst Cassirer called the "human spirit's pursuit of
self-liberation." From this “liberation perspective” Foucault's power/knowledge
relationships, when considered as part of the human spirit's pursuit of
self-liberation, becomes no more than the cultural manifestation of the
"synchronic movement" that defines structure—and, in this structure, we find the answer to the question(s), “Who participates?" and "Wherein does this participation take place?"