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[ 174 ] 10 ] Educating the Self: Dewey and Foucault C. G. Prado Richard Rorty once said that John Dewey waited at the end of the road Michel Foucault traveled.1 Rorty is right with respect to three key ideas which I explore below, but he is wrong about Dewey’s and Foucault’s respective philosophical positions on science in particular and application of intelligence generally. Dewey’s trust in scientific method is very much at odds with Foucault ’s—and Rorty’s own—relativistic construal of science, its methodology, and its self-image. Also, contrary to Foucault, Dewey trusted what I will call the transparency of applied intelligence or our ability to determine when we get things right. These differences significantly qualify, if they do not negate, the similarities between Dewey and Foucault. What I want to focus on in this chapter are the similarities between Dewey’s and Foucault’s conceptions of experience, habit, and the subject: specifically, the similarities in their views of how experience shapes us by imbuing us with attitude-instilling habits. The similarities between Dewey and Foucault on the subject-shaping roles of habit and experience, as well as on the nature of the subject, are striking. However, as striking are the differences between them regarding whether experience’s habit-imbuing results can be controlled and, more generally, on the efficacy and transparency of intellectual endeavor. In Dewey’s optimistic view, experience may be effectively managed for the purpose of educating. In Foucault’s pessimistic—one could say nihilistic— view, discipline-imposed experience produces unpredictable and ultimately unmanageable results. Dewey saw planned stimulation of productive experiences as central to the successful imparting and development of positive attitudes and fruitful skills, and he was obviously convinced that stimulation of the right experiences for learners was not only achievable but indeed the main responsibility of enlightened educators. For his part, at least during his genealogical phase, Foucault had a bleak view of how experience’s effects are determined by power-relations or “power” and so of how individuals actually )DLUILHOG&KLQGG $0 Educating the Self: Dewey and Foucault 175 are affected by the experiences they undergo. So while Dewey and Foucault traveled the same road for some distance, the question is who traveled farther. John Dewey’s voluminous writings defy adequate summation even with respect to particular areas. Happily, most readers of this collection will be reasonably familiar with Dewey’s views, so I will not attempt an inevitably inadequate summary and instead concentrate on the two of Dewey’s works most relevant to my comparison of him with Foucault: Human Nature and Conduct and Experience and Education.2 With respect to Foucault, my focus is his genealogical work, so I concentrate on Discipline and Punish and, indirectly, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1.3 However, the place to begin is not with any of these books but rather with a comment about Dewey that bears importantly on what I want to say. In his introduction to The Later Works of John Dewey, Steven Cahn quotes Charles Frankel as noting “that for Dewey ‘all philosophy was at bottom social philosophy implicitly or explicitly.’” Cahn adds, “I would extend this insight and suggest that for Dewey all social philosophy was at bottom philosophy of education implicitly or explicitly.”4 What I think important about Cahn’s comment is that, for Dewey, reflection on and positive proposals about education —about the imparting and acquiring of skills and knowledge—were integral to his philosophical thought. Dewey’s understanding of the fundamentality of education was as definitive of his general philosophical views as was his pragmatic understanding of truth. Therefore, it is a mistake to read Dewey narrowly as mainly focused on epistemological issues, as so many professional philosophers do, and to think that his interest in education was an interest essentially separable from his concerns with the nature of knowledge and truth and the inadequacies of metaphysics—interests usually thought more philosophically central than educational. Dewey’s thought about education manifests his conception of the subject, of how subjects are formed, and so of who or what is educated. These are fundamental philosophical questions, so grounding a comparison of Dewey and Foucault on Dewey’s thought about education is hardly a matter of focusing on a peripheral area; it is a matter of focusing on the core of Dewey’s philosophizing. As for Foucault, grounding the comparison on his conceptions of power, discipline, and the subject is unquestionably to focus on...

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