Foucault, Dewey, and the History of the Present

In pursuit of the perils of history we have found ourselves most acutely exposed to them; we ourselves bear visibly the traces of those sufferings which afflict contemporary mankind as a result of an excess of history. . . And yet I trust in the inspirational force . . . when I demand that man should above all learn to live and should employ history only in the service of the life he has learned to live.

—Nietzsche

Prologue

Essays comparing thinkers are, at best, of scholarly interest only, and often not even useful or enlightening even for that limited audience. I hope to evade that shortcoming in what follows, and strive even to go beyond scholarly interest. When I wrote the first draft of this study in 1988, the Cold War was in its fourth decade and Foucault had only recently passed away. As final revisions are being made, we find ourselves in a different world, one in which scholarly interest seems quite trivial as passenger planes are being flown into tall buildings by people who see this as an acceptable way to serve a cause, killing themselves along with others who think that business as usual is fairly removed from its own political implications. I have no specific solutions to problems like these, but I do firmly believe that the problem arises in part from ways of thinking that are overly narrow, and that this narrowness comes at least in part from a failure of historical understanding. One simply need not think in the ways that terrorists or capitalists habitually think. There could be commerce without widespread injustice, and there could be nonviolent loyalty to a cause. Here philosophy has some value and some practical function. As Foucault put it, "the object [is] to learn to what extent the effort to think one's own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently" (1985, 9). I do deeply wish that those who think business as usual is something entirely independent from politics and injustice would think again, but not as ardently as I wish those who think that the taking of life is a morally acceptable way to serve a cause would rethink their views. Let us rethink two histories, then, and see whether they contribute anything to freeing our thinking. Dewey and Foucault were both enormously adept at the task of rethinking, and perhaps we can learn to be better at it ourselves by studying and rethinking them. Perhaps not.

The comparison of thinkers in the classical American tradition and the contemporary Continental tradition brings its own difficulties. In his book Genealogical Pragmatism, John Stuhr has undertaken a generalized comparison of these traditions, and has pointed to a number of common failings he finds in other such comparisons. ² Stuhr, in short, says that pragmatists who look at postmodern and Continental thought suffer from four basic weaknesses: being (1) overly general, (2) overly abstract, (3) overly modernist, and (4) overly theoretical. Before saying a word about each of these, let me state that I concur with Stuhr's observation, and will seek to provide a comparison which does not fall into any of these difficulties. By "overly general," Stuhr means that it is common among pragmatists to group together, under blanket headings, Continental thinkers who have little in common, and then simply to generalize about them. No single thinker is taken seriously on his/her own, and the subsequent generalizations are of limited or no value. The remedy to this problem here will be to treat only two thinkers, Dewey and Foucault, and to pursue them each in depth. By "overly abstract," Stuhr means that pragmatists have often detached the theories of postmodernist philosophers from their historical contexts and temperaments for comparison purposes—something contrary to the contextualist commitments of both traditions, but common in the literature in spite of that. The remedy here...