foucault-the_order_of_things1

the human sciences 385
ignore or mask this function and the position they occupy in it, the
manner in which they represent to themselves the society in which it
takes place, the way in which they feel themselves integrated with it or
isolated from it, dependent, subject, or free; the object of the human
sciences is not that man who, since the dawn of the world, or the first
cry of his golden age, is doomed to work; it is that being who, from
within the forms of production by which his whole existence is governed,
forms the representation of those needs, of the society by
which, with which, or against which he satisfies them, so that upon
that basis he can finally provide himself with a representation of economics
itself. The same is true of language: although man is the only
being in the world who speaks, inquiry into phonetic mutations, relationships
between languages, and semantic shifts, does not constitute a
human science; on the other hand, it will be possible to speak of human
science when an attempt is made to define the way in which individuals
or groups represent words to themselves, utilize their forms
and their meanings, compose real discourse, reveal and conceal in it
what they are thinking or saying, perhaps unknown to themselves,
more or less than they wish, but in any case leave a mass of verbal traces
of those thoughts, which must be deciphered and restored as far as
possible to their representative vivacity. The object of the human sciences
is not language (though it is spoken by men alone); it is that
being which, from the interior of the language by which he is surrounded,
represents to himself, by speaking, the sense of the words or
propositions he utters, and finally provides himself with a representation
of language itself.
The human sciences are not, then, an analysis of what man is by
nature; but rather an analysis that extends from what man is in his
positivity (living, speaking, labouring being) to what enables this same
being to know (or seek to know) what life is, in what the essence of
labour and its laws consist, and in what way he is able to speak. The
human sciences thus occupy the distance that separates (though not
without connecting them) biology, economics, and philology from
that which gives them possibility in the very being of man. It would
therefore be wrong to see the human sciences as an extension, interiorized
within the human species, within its complex organism, within its
behaviour and consciousness, of biological mechanisms; and it would