9
rationality, and of the concept.”
6
The first included Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-
Ponty’s existentialism and existentialist phenomenology, and the second included Gaston
Bachelard and Foucault’s mentor Georges Canguilhem, who developed philosophies of the
history of science and knowledge and the philosophy of the concept. This split would remain as
structuralism arose in the 1960s as a descendent of the historical perspective and rival to
existentialism and phenomenology. Structuralism would soon overwhelm its opposition, but
phenomenology had contributed some questions that would be central to structuralism. Because
Foucault had been immersed in both traditions early in his career and became a leading figure in
structuralism, his world reflected both the conflict and the synthesis of these two ways of viewing
the individual subject and consciousness.
Phenomenology
Foucault was heavily influenced by the Heideggerian phenomenology of his time.
7
Although he never identified himself with the existentialists’ interpretations of Husserl and
Heidegger that contributed to their understandings of being and existence, his early work reflects
an engagement with phenomenological analysis based on Heidegger’s work that shared many of
the same ideas as the existentialists Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. With the existentialists, Foucault
took from Heidegger a phenomenology that emphasized constructions of modernity that obscured
authentic experience of being.
8
Although Foucault explicitly rejected existentialism, he shared
6
Foucault, “Life: Experience and Science” in Essential Works of Michel Foucault. vol II., and Gutting, 228.
7
Eribon, 32. Foucault’s ties to existentialism and phenomenology included his regular attendance in Merleau-
Ponty’s class at the Ecole Normale in the late 1940s and his study of Merleau-Ponty’s lectures of the early 50s.
8
Gutting, 131.
Convention