4
which have resemblance to Nietzsche and Heidegger) provide no ground for engaging this
question.
Foucault’s development of post-structuralism, however, opens the door for the possibility
of addressing this problem. In some ways he succeeded and in others he fell short. By
elaborating on Nietzschean skepticism of absolute truths, Foucault moved past both
existentialism and structuralism.
2
In developing post-structuralism Foucault opposed the
phenomenological and existential ideal of the individual having free and conscious power to
know true reality. This was an attack on the specific sense of freedom in existentialism and also
on the general humanistic and subjectivist claims of philosophy since Descartes. Foucault also
challenged the structuralist notion that discovering unconscious levels of meaning reveals
universal and absolute truths. While affirming the existence of structural levels of meaning, he
denied that an understanding of these levels was an understanding of anything beyond a specific
historical account of the development of those levels of meaning.
3
Although rigorous historical analysis, or genealogy, was Foucault’s post-structuralist
method, its ends were not those of science or structuralism. Because there are no foundational
truths for the post-structuralist, and because unconscious structures of meaning created over the
course of time have multiple interpretations, Foucault tells histories that expose and undermine
those values that have developed through relations of power. Unearthing and telling these
histories provides the basis for practices of freedom. Foucault argued that we can grasp and act
in opposition to specific historyies, and that these actions while limited are also free actions. But
the possibility of this kind of straight forward political is lost and undermined by Foucault’s
2
Gary Gutting calls this shift a "fundamental challenge to the defining intellectual ideal since Plato..." French
Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 251
3
Much of Foucault’s work is based on providing accounts of structures of knowledge and how they change over
time. See Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, History of Sexuality Vol. I.
Convention