About the Notion of the Structure in the works of Foucault and Mamardashvili

It was the Soviet philosopher Mamardashvili who has put into the question the self-evidence of the notion of the structure (episteme) by Foucault. By answering to the question what the structure is, Mamardashvili said, the structure is the possibility of the succession of other possibilities. To compare Foucault's and Mamardashvili's works seems to involve some risks. The major difference between them the scholars see in the question of the Enlightenment. Mamardashvili saw the role of the Enlightenment in the modernity as a progressive one, and Foucault, in opposite, as a regressive. But we can say that against all evidence the notion of the episteme by Foucault is placed on a special level of the critique. Foucault speaks not only about the crisis of the Cogito, but about new opportunities to think the philosophical classics. The same thing said Mamardashvili, interpreting the works of Descartes or Kant. It is wrong to associate the modernity with just a temporal dimension. The modernity both by Mamardashvili and Foucault includes the past. And this past is not any accumulation of errors, but as a way to think the conditions of the thought. This method we call - together with Sartre - a progressive-regressive one and we oppose it to the dialectic. The dialectic wants we consider the necessity as a negation of the freedom. We see that by Fou-cault, the necessity (apriori) has nothing to do with the freedom. The freedom is seldom a sign of the historical necessity, said he. And Mamardashvili spoke seldom about the freedom, but the freedom is the necessity of the conscience of the historical freedom, said he. So, the freedom is a kind of historical necessity by both of them. Mamardashvili and Foucault both proved that it is necessary to think the Cartesianism not only as a phenomenon of the remote past, nor a stage of the history of sciences. To think about Descartes is to think about the necessity of the presence of the conscience (mathesis) in the world and to think the world as a structure.

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