Michel Foucault on the «Anthropological Circle»

Abstract

Long before criticism of anthropocentrism became commonplace in the early twenty-first century, Michel Foucault was asking questions about the origins and cultural conditions of human self-referentiality. In his writings of the 1960s, this theme proved to be one of the key, if not the main one. Exploring the history of the emergence of insanity as a subject of psychiatric knowledge, mental illness, and then studying the change from the episteme of classical rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the modern one, Foucault discovered what he called the "anthropological circle". This is the situation in the history of thought when man became the object of positive knowledge, when his mental life became objectified, resulting in the formation of modern anthropocentrism. Man finds himself at the center of modernity not as a godlike Renaissance titan at the center of the cosmos, but as a finite human being who acts as a condition for the production of modern types of knowledge, including knowledge about himself. However, the more concrete and cognizable this man becomes, the more his essence slips, according to Foucault, into the realm of the unthinkable.