Reducing and Apriorizing. Dematerialization and Immaterialization as Philosophical Strategies

Foucault found the starting point of modern European philosophy to be the construction of “man” as both an empirical fact and a transcendental operator. The aim is to show how this construction was made possible by an underlying strategical handling of the concept of matter. Some restrictions imposed on the materiality of knowledge-contents became key in explaining how actual men could gain access to transcendental knowledge. The paper focuses on Husserl and Kant as meaningful turning points of this transcendental discourse. However, the relevance of their dematerializing strategies will be shown to lay beyond their historic-cultural meaning, since they can also provide a way of dealing with knowledge experiences that can be critical even towards modernity’s characteristic anthropocentrism.