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 aresult of an excess of history . . . And yet I trust in the inspirational force . . . when I demand that man should above all learn to live andshould employ history only in the service of the life he has learned to live.

Nietzsche1

PrologueEssays 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 passengerplanes are being flown into tall buildings by people who seethis 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 non-violent 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 thinkone’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently.”2 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 toserve a cause would rethink their views. Let us rethink twohistories, then, and see whether they contribute anything tofreeing 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.3 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 Continental thinkers who have little in common under blanketheadings, 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 temperamentsfor comparison purposes –something contrary to the contextualist commitments of both traditions, but common in the literature in spite of that. The remedy here will be toprovide an extensive account of the context and temperamentsof Dewey and Foucault to support the statements of comparison. By “overly modernist” Stuhr means that metanarratives and foundationalism sometimes creep back in to pragmatic accounts of postmodernism. The remedy for this, as Stuhr puts it, “is to recognize and critically consider the differences, distances, destructions, violence,interests, agonies and foreignness at work in pragmatism’s own will to intimacy.”4 In other words, pragmatists must

learn to see the fault lines in their discursive practices and be prepared to accept the likelihood that a disintegration of their theories may be needed in order to preserve the integrity of their own aims. Here I shall attempt to see the limits of my discourse and not claim morefor it than it can sustain. As Stuhr rightly observes, metanarratives are unavoidable, but fortunately we may be aware of their limits and employ them responsibly.5 Finally, by “overly theoretical” Stuhr means that, for pragmatists, philosophy must “bake some bread,” must attend to practical consequences, and cannot allow itself to be merely a clever or edifying conversation. Here indeed is the most difficult task, for if the freeing of thought from the habits which have led it into things like Cold War and terrorism is a practical activity, would it not be more practical still to take this message directly to people liketerrorists and capitalists than to academics? I do not personally know how to find the audience that could benefit from such a liberation of their thinking, but I do know thatneither Foucault nor Dewey failed to recognize the problem with Stalin or Hitler at times when many people followed these exemplars of the power of narrow thinking, and that both succeeded in finding the audience I do not expect to find. But, as Dewey and Foucault showed in their lives and work, perhaps even professors are not wholly useless in the wider world; hopefully they are not.

So, this essay strives (whether it succeeds or not) to be a piece of Wirkungsgeschichte, effective history, but not precisely in Nietzsche’s or Gadamer’s senses of that term. Until we near the end of this effort, I will not be able to make it clear why I think the connection between Dewey and Foucault is an important event in the development of the story of Spirit, by which I mean the evolution of human consciousness, nor how in offering a piece of historiography, I have also tried to write a history of the present. Perhaps the reader will tolerate the interim discussion upon this promise, and upon the well-established importance of both Dewey and Foucault to 20th century philosophy. Their importance for the 21st century is, however, the underlying motive of the essay.Background

There are some philosophically interesting affinities in methodology, and the historical philosophies of Dewey andFoucault. There is, superficially at least, adequate motivation to explore these affinities, for it may offer insight into some intricate questions that are not trivial to scholars in the present. For example, is evolutionism a philosophy of science or a philosophy of history? Is it neither or in some sense both? Is evolutionism a kind of historicism, or is historicism a type of evolutionism? In pursuing the philosophical problems this raises in the casesof Dewey and Foucault, a rather intricate historical question arises, one I never expected to encounter in

turning over these questions initially, and the historical question demands treatment along side any viable philosophical analysis of the importance of their respectiveviews of change, evolution and history. The historical question is that of a direct (albeit unacknowledged) influence of Dewey’s life and work upon Foucault. This in turn raises all the hirtoriographical problems that

1NOTES

?. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 116.2 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 9; cited in John J. Stuhr, Genealogical Pragmatism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 104.

3 Stuhr gives particular attention to work by Vincent Colapietro, John Ryder, and Kai Nielson. See Genealogical Pragmatism, 90, for a bibliographical survey of the literature.

4 Stuhr, Genealogical Pragmatism, 110. In trying to give philosophical temperament its due in his own thinking, Stuhrdistinguishes “will to intimacy” (pragmatism’s dominant temper) from “will to oppositionality” (the dominant temper of French postmodernism). I have reservations about this way of characterizing the tempers of the two schools, but certainly agree that pragmatists are bad at recognizing whatis unpragmatic in their own habits of thinking.

5 See Stuhr, Genealogical Pragmatism, 102. A defense of metanarrative in this same context may be found in Steven Best, The Politics of Historical Vission: Marx, Foucault, Habermas (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995), 231-236; cf. also 264.

accompany any serious attempt to write about historical influence. I have argued else where that the old concept ofhistorical influence is no longer viable, and that we ought instead to seek and write according to an ideal of “confluence.”6 Yet, confluence includes influence as a special case of itself, and must still be taken up.

Significant, direct, unacknowledged influence in this case is difficult to establish, but it is a distinct possibility in this case, which will come as a surprise to many scholars. Foucault said in his last interview in 1984 that, for him, “there are three categories of philosophers: the philosophers that I don’t know; the philosophers I know and of whom I have spoken; and the philosophers I know and about whom I don’t speak.”7 I believe I can build a plausible case that for Foucault, Dewey falls into the thirdof these categories. This raises the question as to how Foucault viewed this third category, and why he said little or nothing about the philosophers in it. The most obvious answer --that these philosophers said nothing of crucial importance to Foucault’s development or work-- is not an adequate answer. Foucault strikes it down himself in the same interview. He says that in spite of the fact that he

6 See my “Influence as Confluence: Bergson and Whitehead,” in Process Studies, 28:3-4 (Fall-Winter 1999), 301-338.

7. Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 250.

had written nothing on Heidegger and only “only a very smallarticle on Nietzsche,8 these are nevertheless the two authors I have read the most.” “I think,” Foucault continues, “it is important to have a small number of authors with whom one thinks, with whom one works, but aboutwhom one does not write.”9

It would be going much too far to claim that Dewey was among this “small number” for Foucault, but these statementsare quoted to bring to light something about Foucault’s tendencies in citing and writing about philosophers who influenced him, viz., that they need not ever show up by name, no matter how much influence they exerted.10 Their ideas well up and come to the surface, but the names sometimes remain submerged. This is as it should be, in Foucault’s own view.

Thus, the case of Dewey's influence rests on what can be established historically with regard to determining whichof Foucault’s three “categories” Dewey falls under. If it 8. Foucault refers here to his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), available in English in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 76-100. Many would beg to differwith the words “very small,” given that this essay is widely taken to be one of Foucault’s most important contributions tothe history of thought. 9. Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, 250.10. Foucault says, “My entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger,” a man he never wrote about. Ibid.

is the third, as I claim, then the key questions become (1) what can be established about Foucault’s reading of Dewey? and, (2) what concrete ideas do we find in Foucault’s life and work which seem plausibly traceable to his reading of Dewey? The coincidences I will point out could, in the end,prove to be purely fortuitous, although I am inclined to think otherwise.

The actual historical relationship is worth treating (and at greater length than I will do here) in part because this affords, I think, the best means of seeing where Dewey’s and Foucault’s philosophies are continuous, and where they genuinely part ways, which will help me evade, I hope, Stuhr’s complaints about pragmatists who write on contemporasry Continental thought, outlined above. This historical research, in turn, serves largely to help situatewhat is living in the contemporary American and French traditions in one another’s terms, at least in part. Perhaps settling the historical question would constitute a step in the direction of re-establishing the close and fruitful relation between French and American thought which existed in the early days of the 20th century, prior to the First World War, when an attitude of interest and curiosity was more pervasive than the tendency to dismiss or ignore one another.11

I will later focus upon one of Foucault’s key concepts,which I think almost assuredly came from Dewey, “history of the present,” and which had significant consequences for

Foucault’s philosophical development. The most obvious source, other than Dewey, for this idea is Nietzsche, but here Dewey and Nietzsche coincide to some extent, a point often noted by scholars of both Dewey’s and Nietzsche’s thought. By examining the time during which the concept emerges in Foucault’s thought, and by examining what he means by it, I believe it will become clear that on this point Foucault is much more Deweyan than Nietzschean. This is important because Foucault’s philosophical development has had a tremendous impact upon the lives of many persons whose political causes he took up in the 1970’s and early 1980’s.12 Nietzsche was not a political reformer. His insights into the nature of history drove him away from his time and place, not into it. Initially this was Foucault’s response as well, but unlike Nietzsche, he changed and gradually became more involved. Dewey and Foucault were notdriven away from the academy and the political culture of their times by their views of history, but right into the midst of it. One cannot discern in Nietzsche’s view of Wirkungsgeschichte a practical political strategy, but in Dewey’s “history of the present,” as in his life, one can.

11. In particular, I have in mind the fecund philosophical ex-change brought about through Henri Bergson’s contact with William James, and later with Dewey as well. But it is also important to remember how much phenomenology in general owes to James. See the correspondence between Bergson and James in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1935), 2, 599-636.

Further, Nietzsche shunned the media of his day and the sortof popular attention it brought, while Dewey and Foucault never did.13

It might be thought by those well-versed in Foucault that my thesis runs counter to James Miller’s view, so thoroughly argued (albeit controversial), that the dominant influence in Foucault’s life and thought was Nietzsche.14 Miller ranks Heidegger’s influence a close second, and rightly so, in my view. I have no quarrel with Miller, but rather I aim to supplement his view, and I offer here to give an account of certain of Foucault’s views regarding which Miller strains his Nietzschean framework to explain, such as why Foucault entered into politics after his two years in Tunisia. It is interesting that while Miller claims the student revolt of May, 1968, in Paris was intensely interesting to Foucault and perhaps responsible for his political “awakening,” his other two major biographers suggest it was, more likely, the political upheaval in Tunisia during the same time which drew Foucaultout of his well-established pattern of academic seclusion and apolitical stance.15 Foucault’s “politicization” came as a surprise even to some of those close to him, and standsin need of explanation.16 All three biographers agree that Sartre, as a model, held an ambiguous place of both disgust and admiration in Foucault’s heart, but none seems to recognize Dewey’s potential presence in the mix as a role model.

Yet, Foucault’s awakening may be, at least partially, acontinuing manifestation of Dewey’s immense influence on theworld beyond academia, and Foucault’s own political activism, if it is influenced by his way of interpreting “effective history” as “history of the present” (and I will argue that it is) is much more in line with Dewey's “take” on this idea than Nietzsche’s. I cannot here enter as deeply as I would like into the philosophical questions which are raised by this evidence, so I must content myself with pointing out where the interesting questions lie, in myview. I should also point out in advance that a good many profound differences between the thought of Dewey and

12. A good example of this influence can be seen in Foucault’snearly single-handed creation of a split between the new Leftist government of François Mitterand (which came to powerin May, 1981), and the French intelligentsia (teamed up with the Conféderation Française des Travailleurs Démocratique). Foucault, who had at first enthusiastically supported the new Leftist government in France, became quickly dissatisfied with its policy regarding the military coup in Poland. He started andpublished a petition (along with Pierre Bourdieu) which in-spired so much sympathy that the government was forced to abandon its laisséz faire posture. For a full account of this, see the biography of Foucault by Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault,trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,1991), 296-308. This biography is the primary (although not the only) source of the historical details of Foucault's lifegiven in this section. Henceforth this work will be referredto as “Eribon.”13. See James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simonand Schuster, 1993), 163. Henceforth I will refer to this work as “Miller.”

Foucault will not find voice here either. Hence, this essayshould not be taken to suggest that they are any more similar than the present evidence warrants, and that is not too much at this stage of the investigation. At all events,it is clear that Nietzsche was no friend to the weak and dispossessed, while Dewey and Foucault were. This forces usto question the completeness if not the accuracy of Miller’sview.

Foucault’s Reading of DeweyIn March of 1990, Gérard Deledalle presented a paper

before the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy on the state of American Philosophy in Western Europe, particularly France. In this paper, he remarked that Foucault had read some of Dewey’s work. No more details were offered at the time, but they are as follows:17

Deledalle had come to the University of Tunis in 1963 as itsfirst Professor of Philosophy.18 With Jean Wahl acting as

14. See Miller, esp. 66-73. 15. See David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: PantheonBooks, 1993), esp. 205-206. Henceforth I will refer to this work as “Macey.” Eribon is cited below on this same point.16. See Macey, 206-207.

intermediary, Deledalle invited Foucault to come to Tunis toteach.19 Foucault accepted, and thus began a crucial four-year period of transition in Foucault’s thought and in his life. That this was a crucial transition in Foucault’s lifeand thinking no biographer doubts.

Prior to his stint in Tunis, Foucault had pursued an academic life in pretty much the academic way. As Miller puts it, he “seems to have played the academic game with genuine relish and a certain cunning.”20 He was not politically active, but rather intellectually engaged and motivated. After a very brief membership in the Communist party in the early 1950's, he took no further part in political activism until after his return from Tunis in fall of 1968 (and he missed the student revolt in May of ’68 almost entirely). Eribon claims that Foucault’s 1968 re-entry into politics was due to fate: “Since the day he had stepped back from politics [when he left the Communist

17. I wish to thank Professor Deledalle for kindly taking the trouble to provide the details of his relations with Foucault. I had a short interview with Professor Deledalle in March of 1990, and since then he has answered my questionsthrough a generous correspondence.18. Eribon,187.19. See Eribon,187 ff. for a more detailed account of how and why Foucault came to Tunis. This point about how the invitation was extended is in dispute in the various biographies; cf. Miller, 183-185.20. Miller, 172.

Party] it had been just a matter of time before he was sure to become caught up in it again. Existence fated that this would happen in Tunis. . . .”21 On the contrary, however, given that there was nothing in Foucault’s past to indicate that this re-entry was destined to occur, and fate is hard to believe in, this seems a very slim thought. If anything,his Nieztschean tendencies (which Eribon does not emphasize)should have driven Foucault away from politics and public life. He was a somewhat self-absorbed and enigmatic creature; showing no particular inclination to speak for theoppressed, or for anyone but himself, when he spoke at all.

Foucault’s previous involvement with the Marxists had more to do with his megalomania (Eribon) or alienation from the mainstream (Miller) as a young man than his social conscience, or some selfless vision of the Good he might have held. The Marxists provided him with a bad experience that he later remembered with bitterness.22 The antithesis of an active voice of conscience, Foucault was, according toEribon, cold, cynical, secretive; a deeply self-alienated man who was, strangely, also quite ambitious in a secular sense. Whether accurate or not, this is not at all the picture of the man Foucault eventually became. So many down-trodden people benefitted from Foucault’s entry into political life that one is led to wonder whether the good he

21. Eribon, 192.22. See Miller, 172; Macey, 193-194.

did makes it seem, to his admirer Eribon, as if the gods intended it. Yet, as Miller points out repeatedly, Foucaultheld something akin to Nietzsche's view of genius as simultaneously made and fated.23 The “fated” part, if therereally is such a thing, will not be subject to much analysis, but the “made” part may be. I would like to offera little more in the way of concrete evidence about what mayhave set Foucault to thinking, and brought out his latent social conscience.

It is fair to say that, while the signs of a basic change in Foucault’s work only began to show up after his election to the Collège de France in 1970 (two full years after he returned from Tunisia), still the change in his political activity became evident immediately upon his return.24 Seri-ous changes had already taken place during the time in Tunis.

There was considerable political unrest in Tunisia in 1967-68, between Tunisian students and the government. The French professors at Tunis were more or less outside of these disputes, but their sympathies were, one would judge from the accounts given by Foucault’s biographers, largely with the students. Foucault used his protected status (for he was not only a French citizen, but a famous one) to assist students who had been reduced to fugitives in their 23. See Miller, 70-72.24. See the account of Foucault’s activity at Vincennes in 1969 in Eribon, 201 ff.; Miller, 175 ff.; and Macey, 209 ff.

own land by the heavy-handed response of the Tunisian government. There was risk in what Foucault did, but initially it seemed that deportation would have been about the extent of what the Tunisian authorities would dare to doto someone so prominent.25 However, Foucault was beaten by persons who may or may not have taken their orders from the Tunisian government, apparently as a warning to stay out of the situation.26 This is indeed a serious challenge to one’s complacency.

At the same time, Foucault was engaged in a most unpolitical activity, writing L'Archéologie du savoir. This is largely held to be the transitional text from Foucault’s “archaeological period” to his “genealogical period,” although these convenient categories grossly oversimplify what was happening within his work. Nevertheless, the book he wrote in Tunis was clearly a re-thinking of his earlier efforts. As he said:

What was my aim in writing this book? . . . . By going a little farther in the same direction [as Les mots et les choses], and coming back, as if by a new turn in the spiral . . . I hoped to show the position from which I was speaking . . . to give acontent to the word archaeology, which I had so farleft empty.27

25. See Eribon, 194-195 for more details about Foucault’s activities during this time.26. Macey, 205.

In brief, he was stepping back and reassessing how he had done the things he had already done. He was seeking a broader point of view from which to understand history and historiography (and the problems which accompany the latter), as the book reveals.

If this were all there was to the context in which Foucault developed beyond academia and into political life, then it would hold little interest for those who follow the classical American tradition. But a third factor --aside from the political unrest around Foucault and his efforts tore-think his earlier work-- was present during this time when he was searching for a new standpoint. This factor wasGérard Deledalle and his work. As Eribon puts it, “Foucaultconsulted with him as an expert on English and American philosophy, which he [Foucault] did not know well. Deledalle talked with him almost daily during his walks through Sidi Bou Saïd, and he watched the stack of papers, black with notes, grow higher with every visit.”28 The stack of papers was the manuscript for L'Archéologie du savoir.

27. From the book jacket of the Gallimard, Paris edition of the book, cited by Eribon, 191. Foucault said similar thingsin a number of other places. For instance, see the two interviews “The Archaeology of Knowledge,” (conducted by J.J.Brochier for Magazine Littéraire, April-May, 1969), and “The Birth of a World,” (conducted by Jean-Michel Palmier for Le Monde, May 3, 1969); both interviews appear in Foucault Live, trans. John Johnston, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e) of Columbia University, 1989), 45-62.28. Eribon, 192.

Deledalle has provided further details regarding what passed between them during these two years, and has generously offered evidence of what he says. Foucault’s familiarity with American philosophy (and Deledalle’s work) dated back to 1954. In that year, Deledalle published his Histoire de la philosophie américaine, and Foucault wrote the first review of it.29 For twenty years prior to 1967, Deledalle had been researching and writing his book L'idee d'experience dans

la philosophie de John Dewey,30 and it was in the final stages whenFoucault arrived in Tunisia. According to Deledalle, Foucault read this book, as well as the French translation of Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry which Deledalle was also finishing at the time.31

29. See Les moissons de l'esprit, 1955, p. 7. This is a “review” only in the sense that Foucault wrote the summary of the con-tents, etc., for advertising and informational ends. His praise is superlative, but little can be concluded from this,because the summary aims mainly at informing the public what is being put out by the Presses Universitaires de France, notat engaging the text in a critical way.30. Deledalle, L'idee d'experience dans la philosophie de John Dewey (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967).31. Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1938); Logique: La théorie de l'enquête (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), 696 pp. Professor Deledallesays he cannot be certain that Foucault read the entire trans-lation of Dewey’s Logic. This information is contained in a letter from Professor Deledalle to the present writer, dated May 5, 1991.

This information greatly focusses the question of the extent of Dewey’s possible influence on Foucault. It gives two primary sources which can be consulted for comparisons. Regarding the first text, if Dewey had any influence on Foucault’s decision to branch out from academia and into political life, it must have come through Deledalle’s book on Dewey. This question would be difficult to settle to anyone’s satisfaction, but I will point out some co-incidences which support the thesis that Dewey’s influence was indeed felt here. Regarding the second source, the Logic, if there was any detectable philosophical or methodological influence, this probably came by way of Dewey’s later Logic. I think this level of influence is moreeasily demonstrated, but as always with historical evidence,doubt remains. Let me address each of these in turn.

Because Deledalle’s book on Dewey has not yet appeared in English, it has not been widely read and discussed on that side of the Atlantic. It is important to understand just what Foucault read. Deledalle’s book on Dewey is the most comprehensive treatment of his philosophical development ever written.32 There is nothing to rival it in

32. Deledalle's treatment is more exhaustive than either of the two large studies published on Dewey in the past decade: Robert Westbrook’s John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); and, Stephen C. Rockefeller’s John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

English. Herbert W. Schneider’s description of the book puts it well:

This volume . . . gives us by far the most comprehensive exposition of the growth and substance of Dewey's philosophy that has appeared to date, and that probably ever will appear. Few historians have the interest and patience to explore in such minute detail, not only Dewey’s concept of experience, but the relationship of itsown development to Dewey’s own experience. The theme which the author takes very seriously and which gives exceptional vigor to the volume is stated in Dewey's own words as a kind of frontispiece: “Better it is for philosophy to err in active participation in the living struggles and issues of its own age and times, than to maintain an immune monastic impeccability . . . . To try to escape from the snares and pitfalls of time by recourse to traditional problems and interests --rather than that, let the dead bury their own dead.” (Philosophy and Civilization, 55).33

Schneider was a scholar whose own patience and sobriety werelegendary. In the three and a half decades since this book appeared there has still never been a more comprehensive exposition of Dewey’s philosophy.34

The point here is twofold. First, this is significant because, without having to read Dewey’s massive corpus, one derives from Deledalle’s book a complete picture of what

33. Review of Deledalle’s book by Herbert W. Schneider, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 3 (July 1967), 300. The allusion is toJesus’ words to the man who wanted to bury his father before following Jesus.

each of Dewey’s books and articles accomplished. Foucault got a thorough account of Dewey’s philosophical development,his reading, and influences at each stage. All significant articles and all of Dewey’s books are treated synoptically by Deledalle, as well as critically analyzed and contextualized.

Second, Deledalle also gives careful attention to relevant biographical information, and this is how Foucault would have been informed about the nature and extent of Dewey’s political activism; what Deledalle calls Dewey's “penchant for defending the cause of those who do not enjoy the full benefit of their rights.”35 Deledalle traces Dewey’s activism and social conscience back to his

34. The work is so thorough, clear, and comprehensive that Herbert Schneider reported in a letter to Deledalle (May 31, 1964; 38-39 of Deledalle's manuscript “American Correspondence”) that at a meeting he had recently attended, Southern Illinois University Press requested that Deledalle’sbook be translated so that it could be published as a companion volume to the planned (now completed) 38 volume critical edition of Dewey’s collected works. As Schneider said, “We would like to have an English translation of your book on Dewey as a sort of intellectual biography, to accompany the early volumes of his works. There is nothing comparable to your work being done in this country.” When notranslator could be found, the press settled for a volume entitled A Guide to the Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970).35. Deledalle, L'idee d'experience, 54 (all translations from the French are mine). Hereafter I will refer to this work as “Deledalle.”

experiences growing up in Burlington, Vermont during the industrialization of the Northeastern U.S. (with all the social problems which resulted). Poverty and oppression of the working class were what Dewey saw growing up, and this is vividly portrayed in Deledalle’s account of Dewey’s earlylife.36 This poverty and decay is treated as a primary motivating force through Dewey’s early years, and one which re-emerges in an important way in later years.

The point is that in reading Deledalle’s book, Foucaultcould not have failed to see the continuity between Dewey’s academic philosophy and his leftist, social activism. This experiential nexus is the focal point of Deledalle’s book. In seeing this continuity, Foucault could not have failed tosee the discontinuity between his own cloistered academic existence, and the sorts of things that followed from his own rewriting of history as the history of the institutionalexclusion of difference.37 Dewey’s words condemning “immunemonastic impeccability” from Deledalle's epigraph must have stung Foucault just a bit, particularly when there were suffering student activists at his doorstep. That “monasticimpeccability” described him perhaps too well, up to that time.

36. In this regard, Deledalle follows George Dykhuizen’s well-known biography of Dewey, The Life and Mind of John Dewey, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), and disagrees with the accounts of Sidney Hook and Irwin Edman who erroneously suggested that Burlington had little poverty and a homogeneous population. See Dykhuizen, 2-3, 327-328.

There is also some reason to think that Foucault might have identified with Dewey to a degree. Both had come to their philosophies through a predilection for Hegel, and a slow evolution beyond it.38 Each had a Hegelian “mentor,” so to speak. In Dewey’s case this was George S. Morris, and

3735. Particularly, see Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), and The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books,1975), both of which were originally published before he wentto Tunisia. These works explore exclusion and its social function. The practical effect of this sort of work was thatFoucault had become a sort of spokesman for the insane, without ever having intentionally undertaken to start a reform movement (see Eribon, 125-126). His original interestin these themes, if Eribon is correct (and on this point Miller concurs), was more personal than political, and more academic curiosity than ethical concern.

38. The debate as to whether or not Dewey ever really got beyondHegel is interminable in Deweyan circles, but Deledalle holdsthat he did, slowly. From the death of George S. Morris in 1889 to Dewey's reading of James’ Principles of Psychology in 1891 the “organic idealism” of Dewey's youth began to crack and finally break. See Deledalle, 92 ff.

In Foucault’s case, Rorty has pointed out that there is a strong temptation to lump him with all the other “Hegelian historicists,” and “to think of him as a somewhat twitchy andoverwrought member of the Hegelian team.” But we should not make this mistake, he argues; Foucault has gotten beyond Hegel and included Hegel within his broad critique of modernity. See Rorty, “Foucault and Epistemology,” in Fou-cault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (New York: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1986), 45. Foucault himself makes illuminating remarks to this effect in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, 249-250.

in Foucault’s case it was Jean Hyppolite.39 Both had gottenHegel “second-hand” early on, through the eyes of a benevolent --but powerful-- guide with a specific slant on Hegel. Both Dewey and Foucault had encountered difficulty getting into graduate school,40 and both had come into theirown, philosophically speaking, by reading Hegel prior to entering graduate school. Foucault and Dewey both grew up in the shadow of a great war they were too young to fight. Yet, they were different in at least the following way: Dewey had used his philosophical prominence to effect socialchange all the way from his own doorstep in Chicago or New York to the far reaches of the world; Turkey, China, Russia and Japan.

Did Dewey’s life give Foucault ideas about how to use his own recently achieved prominence? This is at least possible. Foucault read many books, and it is difficult to tell which ones might have stood as object lessons to him, and there is no question that Nietzsche was heavily in his thinking during these same two years. We may never know, but one parallel between Foucault’s and Dewey’s activities warrants particular mention. Foucault knew that Dewey, along with journalist Franklin Ford, had tried to start an intellectual newspaper in Michigan. Deledalle gives the following description:

39. See Deledalle, 30-39, and Eribon 16-22.40. See Eribon, 13; Deledalle, 26-27.

[In 1892] Ford tried to carry out his project of starting a free newspaper. It was to be called Thought News, and the prospectus announced that “the immediate responsibility for its conduct . . . [is] in the hands of John Dewey of the philosophical department of the University of Michigan” . . . Dewey was obliged to explain, in defense of his desire to reform journalism, that .. . what he wanted to do was “transform philosophysomewhat by introducing a little newspaper business into it,” and “to show that philosophy has some use.” Dewey said that “when philosophic ideas are not inculcated by themselves, but used as tools to point out the meaning of phases of social life, they begin to have some life and value.”41

After reading Dewey, Foucault had also been “closely involved in launching Libération,”42 a free, intellectual newspaper of the French Left-wing. Compare what Dewey said about philosophic ideas being “tools” above with what Foucault says regarding his own journalistic enterprise:

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than “politicians” think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in eventsmanifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not

41. Deledalle, 89. The quote from Dewey is in the Detroit Tribuneof April 12, 1892.42. Eribon, 281.

rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think. This is thedirection we want these “journalistic reports” to take. An analysis of thought will be linked to ananalysis of what is happening. Intellectuals willwork together with journalists at the point where ideas and events intersect.43

Dewey could not have expressed his own projected plans any better than Foucault did here. This may be sheer coincidence, but what is more compelling is that Foucault must have taken away from his reading of Deledalle’s book the idea of an intellectual who was socially involved through his journalistic activities.

As Foucault would have known from reading Deledalle, Dewey’s journalistic efforts hardly ceased with Thought News (which never actually appeared at all). Mainly through his contributions to the New Republic and other popular magazines Dewey became a visible and active intellectual force behind intelligent social, political and educational reform in America.44 Foucault was privy to this 20th century example

43. Eribon, 282. The quote is from the Italian newspaper Corriere della sera, November 12, 1978.

of a politically involved intellectual through Deledalle’s book, and the example was impressed upon him at just the right moment --the moment when Foucault’s thinking was ripe for a broadening influence, and he was forming a sense of social responsibility in response to the violence and oppression all around him in Tunisia.

Naturally, Foucault had many other potential examples of activist intellectuals he could have followed --Sartre, Bourdieu, Dumézil, Althusser, etc.-- so this argument settles nothing, but the facts are as I have reported. Before reading Dewey, Foucault was a typical academic. These other examples were available before Foucault read Dewey, but evidently did not inspire him to enter the political fray any earlier. Immediately after reading Dewey, Foucault began doing the things Dewey had done, beginning with educational reform and forming a philosophy department at Vincennes (as Dewey had done in Chicago), organizing intellectuals in support of social reform (as Dewey had done in helping to found the American Association of University Professors, the Outlawry of War movement, and the effort to form a new political party), founding a newspaper, engaging personally in investigative inquiries,45

and doing journalistic writing for the people. Foucault haddone none of these things before,46 and his friends and colleagues were at first greatly astonished at his new-foundactivism.47 Sartre in particular was also involved in all of these sorts of things, but the timing of events renders

it highly unlikely that he served as a model for Foucault (they parted ways over Stalin long before that), or as a goad into activism. In an interview with La Quinzaine littéraire in March of 1968, Foucault basically renounced Sartre.48

The fact is that Foucault’s transformation occurred in Tunisia, when he was speaking with Deledalle almost daily, reading Deledalle’s and Dewey’s work, writing L'Archéologie du

savoir, and watching the trouble among the Tunisians with a keen eye. Thus, perhaps Foucault’s political transformationwas at least encouraged to some degree by his exposure to Dewey. Much more could be said for and against the idea, but at this point, it is a matter for trained historians to settle.

The History of the PresentWhat is of more philosophical interest is the way in

which Foucault’s reading of Dewey’s 1938 Logic may have influenced him philosophically and methodologically. The historical connection of Foucault to this particular book ofDewey’s has been made, and shown to have occurred at a time when Foucault was changing both personally and intellectually. Can any further elucidation be given to theextent of Dewey’s influence? It can indeed. A number of things can and should be said, but here I will examine only one idea from the 1938 Logic which plays a key role in all ofFoucault’s later work, and which I think he got from Dewey, either unconsciously or consciously.49

In searching through Foucault’s published works, I havenot found one single reference to Dewey, save the one in Foucault’s 1955 review of Deledalle’s Histoire de la philosophie

américaine (cited above). Although Foucault, as an historian, was notorioous for under-documenting his sources,he was never one to shy away from citing sources on account of their being obscure or unauthoritative. Yet the 1984 interview (quoted at the outset) suggests that some key names might be missing. Naturally, we cannot rule out the possibility that, if Foucault appropriated a central idea from Dewey, he did so unconsciously.

Foucault was evidently not given to thinking about Dewey, or talking about him. According to John Stuhr, who studied with Foucault, I learned that Foucault was “genuinely intrigued” with the link between his work and pragmatism. Still, after meeting with Foucault regularly for some months and discussing pragmatism with him, Stuhr said “I have no evidence that Foucault even carefully read the pragmatists . . .”50 Macey says that “it is obvious from [Foucault's] lectures [in Tunisia in 1968] that Foucault was reading widely in the area of analytic and linguistic philosophy, and his study of these topics would have a marked impact on L'Archéologie. It appears that most ofhis knowledge on this subject was acquired in Tunisia and derived from books lent him by Gérard Deledalle.”51 Apparently Macey considers pragmatism and analytic philosophy as of a piece, but at least it is clear that a

foreign influence was coming into Foucault’s thinking, and that it was not all second-hand. Yet, in line with Stuhr’s doubts, in an interview in conducted in America in 1971, Foucault made the point that in France, “One does not read American philosophy, history and criticism at all; American books are translated only after an enormous delay.”52 Foucault had left Tunis less than three years before this, and it is clear that one example of the delay in translationhe had in mind was Dewey’s Logic, being translated almost thirty years after it had first appeared. Yet, back in France, and away from Deledalle, American philosophy was notbeing discussed, and it would not have been in the fore of Foucault’s mind.

As the years passed between his time in Tunisia, his reading of Dewey could have lost its identity in the vast pool of ideas swirling about in Foucault’s mind. All this indicates rather strongly to me that I can only defend a claim that Foucault unconsciously appropriated a key idea from Dewey’s Logic.

But a singular idea does in fact emerge. The idea is that of a “history of the present.” The Archaeology of Knowledge

is not by any stretch a “Deweyan” book. Deweyans will find little there that they would recognize or with which they could agree. It is a meta-methodological rumination on the sorts of things Foucault had been doing up to that time. Itcleared away the messy rubble of a set of forays into the meaning and activities of institutions from the Renaissance

to the modern era. Only after this had been accomplished did Foucault feel “free” to go on to other things; a sentiment he expressed in interviews. Nevertheless, the degree of similarity in the points made, the images invoked,the schools of thought referred to, and the general positionheld between Foucault’s fourteen-page methodological manifesto at the beginning of The Archaeology of Knowledge and Dewey’s fourteen-page treatment of historical judgment in the 1938 Logic --this similarity is too extensive to be accidental.53

45. In particular, Dewey was involved in the Trotsky Commission in 1937 (see Deledalle, 479 ff.), and Foucault’s involvement in the infamous Bruay-en-Artois affair (see Eribon, 248 ff.).46. Foucault actually had been involved in governmental efforts to reform French education, and he was in part responsible for drafting the plan which inadvertantly motivated to the student revolt in May of 1968. His activities were Rightist if anything (see Eribon, 164; Miller, 172-173), and he was largely thought to be a conservative due to this one limited political project he took part in. See Eribon, 135 ff.47. See Eribon, 132; Macey, 206.44 Many of these articles and essays are collected in Characters and Events: Popular Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, 2 vols., ed. Joseph Ratner (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1929). These essays are spread across several volumes of the critical edition of Dewey’s collected work, and have a greater effect upon the reader in this two volume edition.

I cannot here undertake a lengthy systematic expositionof these two pieces of work, but I encourage readers comparefor themselves, and I will offer a more limited summary of the most poignant similarities. These passages are largely what persuade me that Dewey’s philosophical hand is also among the many hands which rest upon Foucault’s (somewhat crowded)

48. This interview, originally conducted by J.-P. El Kabbach, has been translated into English as “Foucault Responds to Sartre,” in Foucault Live (cited above), pp. 35-43; see especially 40. Cf. also Macey, 193-194, which makes clear that while Foucault did not deny saying these things, he was not happy to see them printed.49. A stronger case can actually be made for the claim that Foucault reformed his idea of “experience” in response to Dewey than can be made for the idea of “history of the present.” Both Miller and Macey notice and document this transformation without making the connection to Foucault’s reading of Dewey. Miller points out:

Criticizing his [Foucault’s] own previous preoccupation with “what I called an ‘experience’,”he now maintains [in The Archaeology of Knowledge] that it would be “vain to seek, beyond structural, formal, or interpretive analyses of language, a domain that is at last liberated from all positivity, in which the freedom of the subject, the labor of the human being, or the unfurling of atranscendental purpose could be displayed” . . . ashe deliberately admits in his conclusion, he has deliberately “ignored” the phenomenon of “transcendence” . . . . (160).

Dewey had also begun with a transcendental view of “experience,” as is detailed in Deledalle’s book, and moved

shoulder --with Nietzsche, Heidegger and Hegel, Duméziel andHyppolite, among others.

The idea of “history of the present” occurs in The

Archaeology of Knowledge, but only briefly, and it is not thema-tized. Discussing the various archaeological levels at

toards a “genetic” view instead. Had reading Dewey undermined Foucault’s way of seeing experience as a transcendental phenomenon? As Macey notes, in The Archeaology ofKnowledge, Foucault had criticized his earlier habit of “giving too great and too enigmatic a role to ‘experience’ and for thereby coming dangerously close to accepting that history had an ‘anonymous and general subject’” (200). Here Foucault is avoiding what Dewey called “the philosopher's fallacy,” of taking abstract philosophical concepts for realities. The trick was to articulate a view of experience which did not committ this error, and scholars are not in agreement as to whether Dewey or Foucault ever succeeded in doing this. Yet, it was a common concern of both, and more than an accident that Foucault’s rejection of his own earliertendency to use transcendental arguments coincided with his reading of Dewey's arguments for rejecting this approach.

This topic is actually of greater philosophical importance than the topic of this chapter, and a detailed study of Foucault's use of the idea of “experience” before The Archaeology of Knowledge and after it needs to be done. However, it does not fit directly into the aims of this book and cannot be undertaken here.

Another significant study has been carried out by Frank J. Mackie, entitled “Pragmatism Reconsidered: John Dewey and Michel Foucault on the Consequences of Inquiry,” in Recovering Pragmatism's Voice: The Classical Tradition, Rorty, and the Philosophy of Communication, eds. Lenore Langsdorf and Andrew R. Smith (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 155-176, 301-304. Mackie employsThomas Alexander’s general approach to Dewey in an effort to see the rapprochement between Dewey and Foucault on the relations among inquiry, art, and the human sciences --

which a history can be written, Foucault remarks in passing that “historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by thepresent state of knowledge, they increase with every transformation and never cease, in turn, to break with themselves . . . .”54 Foucault goes on to say that “the great problem presented by such historical analyses is . . .one of transformations that serve as new foundations, the rebuilding of foundations.”55 The danger is that every new history threatens to offer itself as a new foundation to replace the old foundation it has only just undermined.

Dewey’s anti-foundationalism is well known, and clearlyexpressed in his 1938 Logic. Those who claim Dewey did not

especially as these issues congeal around the question of thebody. Finally, another important part of the story one needsto connect Dewey to Foucault is provided, unknowingly, by Robert Castel in his “Problematization as a Mode of Reading History,” trans. Paula Wissing, in Foucault and the Writing of History, ed. Jan Goldstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 237-252. Naturally, the case that Foucault used the technique of the “problematic situation” in writing histories helps the case that Dewey influenced him, since the most extensive treatmentof the problematic situation is in the very book by Dewey that Foucault read, the Logic. Castel is not evidently aware of or interested in any of this.50. Letter from John Stuhr to the author, dated December 10, 1990.51. Macey, 190.52. “A Conversation with Michel Foucault,” by John K. Simon, Partisan Review, 38:2, 1971; reprinted under the title “Rituals of Exclusion,” in Foucault Live, 63-72; the quotation is from p.71.

consistently maintain this stance, such as Rorty,56 usually do so on the basis of things said in Experience and Nature, and not the later Logic. Foucault shares this anti-foundationalist sentiment with Dewey, as Rorty points out:

Dewey and Foucault make exactly the same criticismof the tradition. They agree, right down the line, about the need to abandon traditional notions of rationality, objectivity, method, and truth. They are both, so to speak, “beyond method.”57

It is not insignificant that Foucault’s repudiation of structuralism also came at the time he was reading Dewey. In April of 1967, Foucault was still accepting the label “structuralist,” and even called himself “structuralism’s

53. The similarity in vocabulary becomes still more striking when one compares L'Archéologie du savoir to Logique: La théorie de l'enquête, the French translation of Dewey's Logic.54. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), 5.55. Ibid.56. See Rorty’s article “Dewey's Metaphysics,” in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 72-89.57. Rorty, “Method, Social Science, Social Hope,” in Conse-quences of Pragmatism, 204. Cf. also 207. In both the case of Dewey and that of Foucault, Rorty is only right if one understands “method” to mean “traditional Cartesian method.” Both Dewey and Foucault employed a variety of methods, and were hardly averse to the idea of “method” as such.

altarboy” who “shook the bell and the faithful fell to theirknees and the unbelievers cried out.”58 By 1969, he was clearly refusing the label.59 Structuralism is a crypto-foundationalist point of view, at least regarding the conviction that there are intelligible and reasonable stablestructures within which meaning emerges. It was to France, functionally, what analytic philosophy was to American philosophy, although more of a (big) bottle rocket in Francethan the Roman candle language analysis is and was in America.

An anti-foundational approach to history is only one aspect of “history of the present,” however, and as Rorty rightly points out, it was not as novel in France as it seemed in the United States.60 The idea of “history of the present,” hinted at in The Archaeology of Knowledge, was not really embraced in print by Foucault until 1975, in Surveiller

et punir.61 The lapse of time is long enough that Foucault may

58. Eribon, 167. The interview was for a Tunisian newspaper.59. Ibid.60. Rorty, “Foucault and Epistemology,” in Foucault: A Critical Reader, 45.61. Foucault, Surveiller et punir; naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); English edition, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). This idea was central enough to Foucault’s view that the group he founded in Berkeley, California (which continuesto this day) calls its newsletter “History of the Present” (see Eribon, 314).

have forgotten where he had seen the phrase “histoire de le

présent,” but in fact, he had seen it.

Dewey and the History of the Present.It would be useful to examine what Dewey says about

history, and history of the present in the book Foucault read, and then to look at what Foucault said. Dewey addresses the question of history in terms of the paradox involved in writing history (as Foucault often does)62 --theinability of the historian to attain the standpoint necessary to write a history, and the subsequent cover-up ordenial of this difficulty by the historian in the text he writes. Dewey says:

Readers [of the historian’s work] have before themthe ready-made products of inferential inquiry. If the historical writer has a dramatic imagination, the past seems to be directly presentto the reader. The scenes described and episodes narrated appear to be directly given instead of being inferred constructions. A reader takes conclusions as they are presented by the historianto be directly given almost as much as he does in reading a well constructed novel.63

Dewey adds that “it is because of these facts that the writing of history is an instance of judgment as a reso-62. See for example, Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 90-93.63. Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, (Henry Holt & Co., New York:1938), 231.

lution through inquiry of a problematic situation.”64 Historiography starts with a problem in the present, even if that problem is that we do not understand a set of past events to our satisfaction. It must be recognized that knowledge of past events is deemed valuable only because we also suppose that it leads us to understand ourselves betteras creatures of the present.

In this context, Dewey compares the writing of history to the natural sciences insofar as both are a sort of inquiry. He points out that “the formation of historical judgments lags behind that of physical judgments not only because of greater complexity and scantiness of data, but also because to a large extent historians have not developedthe habit of stating to themselves and to the public the systematic conceptual structures which they employ in organizing their data. . . . Too often the conceptual framework is left as an implicit assumption.”65 This is, ofcourse, precisely what Foucault was trying to make explicit in The Archaeology of Knowledge. Dewey concludes that:

The slightest reflection shows that the conceptualmaterial employed in writing history is that of the period in which a history is written. There is no material available for leading principles and hypotheses save that of the historic present. As culture changes, the conceptions that are dominantin a culture change. Of necessity new standpoints

64. Ibid., 232.65. Ibid., 233.

for viewing, appraising and ordering data arise. History is then rewritten. Material that had formerly been passed by, offers itself as data because the new conceptions propose new problems for solution, requiring new factual material for statement and test. At a given time, certain conceptions are so uppermost in the culture of a particular period that their application in constructing the events of the past seems to be justified by “facts” found in a ready-made past. .. . Justification if it is to be had proceeds fromthe verification which the conceptions receive in the present. . . .66

Foucault would have found these ideas very familiar when he read this in 1967, having based his own most recent work, The Order of Things, upon the premise that the discursive social practices of an age determine what can and cannot be said, and therefore thought, in that age. Dewey is 66. Ibid., 233 (my emphasis). It bears mentioning that Dewey used the same phraseology in a much more widely read work. He said:

The segregation which kills the vitality of historyis divorce from present modes and concerns of social life. The past just as past is no longer our affair. If it were wholly gone and done with, there would be only one reasonable attitude toward it. Let the dead bury their dead. But knowledge of the past is the key to understanding the present. History deals with the past, but this past is the history of the present.

Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 213-214. Deledalle also translated this book of Dewey’s into French (first appearing in 1975), but I have no concrete evidence that Foucault read it.

asserting this much, and more, however, but without the transcendental argument that there exists something like an “episteme” which dictates the terms of thought and discoursein an age. All histories are histories of the present for Dewey. All historical judgment is inferential, uncertain, and influenced by present cultural values. Moreover, as inquiry of a sort, historiography must be undertaken so as to make its conceptual bias plain. Dewey says that history is “constructed,” and not reconstructed. Foucault had already hit upon much of this, and a similar form of historicism had been “in the air” on the continent at least since the appearance of Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode in 1960(and perhaps earlier, since Dilthey’s notion of Geschichtlichkeit had been taken up and worked out by Heidegger). One can find the idea gaining acceptance British and American thought as early as 1925.67 What was fairly new in what Dewey said had to do with the logic of inquiry employed by the historiographer, a logic of selective emphasis with regard to the historical document.

Dewey held that the propositions which historians employ to make their construction “are not final historical propositions in themselves,” and that “strictly speaking, they are not in their isolation historical propositions at all;” but rather, “they are propositions about what now exists; they are historical in their function since they serve as material data for inferential constructions.”68

“In consequence,” Dewey adds, “they are relative to a prob-lem.”69

The upshot here is that selective historiography is obliged, whether it likes it or not, to serve a higher purpose than academic curiosity. Either by commission or omission, the historiographer fulfills a socially directed, value-laden, institutional function, and it would be better if the ends of this activity were chosen intelligently and then stated explicitly (so that the chosen end may seen and evaluated for what it is) than for the historiographer to become an unselfconscious cog in the institutional machinery. I do not see how Foucault could have escaped reflecting upon this point in Dewey’s Logic. Had he not allowed himself to become just such a cog, at the most practical level? Why should he care to write academic histories for the consumption of academic minds? To what ends, then, were his own histories written? Had he chosen those ends? Is such choice even possible? The problem of the relation between power and knowledge looms on the horizon of this last question.70

Dewey proposes further that the historiographer should emphasize, as much as possible, the role played by present cultural/social values in the selection of historical data towards a stated goal. We must admit, if we wish to write history, that “the idea of history involves a cumulative continuity of movement in a given direction towards stated outcomes . . . .”71 This is not to say that history is

necessarily causal and continuous, but rather that anyone writing a history must assume this --which goes precisely counter to the presuppositions of Foucault’s archaeological approach, and calls into question the sincerity of such a method in the same spirit in which Foucault questioned himself in The Archaeology of Knowledge. Finally, Dewey says that “if the fact of selection is acknowledged to be primaryand basic, we are committed to the conclusion that all history is necessarily written from the standpoint of the present, and is, in an inescapable sense, the history not only of the present but of that which is contemporaneously judged to be important in the present.”72 The problem then has two loci; the standpoint of the historian, and the status of the materials employed by the historiographer. Foucault calls the latter the problem of the “document” in The Archaeology of Knowledge.73 Dewey simply says that “annals are material for history, but hardly history itself.”74

Foucault and the History of the Present.Foucault showed signs of having internalized these

ideas soon after returning from Tunisia. In a published conversation with militant students in November, 1971, Foucault pointed out to them that “in a history course, you are asked to learn certain things and to ignore others: thus, certain things form the content of knowledge and its norms.”75 Bringing in the problem of the document, he goes on to say:

As a way of approaching texts --as a matter of choice and exclusion-- the presentation affects everything that is said and done in the present. The system is telling you, in effect: “If you wishto understand and perceive events in the present, you can only do so through the past, through an

67. In a fascinating passage of which Dewey was very likely aware, A.N. Whitehead had said (in 1925):

It is a curious delusion that the rock upon which our beliefs can be founded is an historical investigation. You can only interpret the past in terms of the present. The present is all that you have; and unless in this present you can find general principles which interpret the present as including a representation of a whole community of existents, you cannot move a step beyond your little patch of immediacy. Thus history presupposes a metaphysic.

Religion in the Making (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 1996 [1926]), 84. This is of course, not an idea which was new byany stretch even at this time. Whitehead, for example, had given clear voice to this idea as early as 1917 (in “The Aimsof Education”) and James Harvey Robinson, Charles A. Beard and Carl Becker had said similar things in the teens, twenties and thirties. One also finds such ideas as history of the present in Emerson’s controversial 1838 Harvard Divinity School Speech. If one is willing to understand “history of the present” in broad enough terms, one even finds it in St. Augustine’s Confessions:

What is now evident and clear is that neither future nor past exists, and it is inexact language to speak of three times --past, present and future.Perhaps it would be exact to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of

understanding --carefully derived from the past-- which was specifically developed to clarify the present.”76

Foucault thought this claim had to be resisted, and that thereverse was actually the case --the past must be understood through the present. This view was not an overt feature of his first three “histories” Foucault wrote. If anything, the opposite assumption was operative. However, his first history after Tunisia (and Deledalle, and Dewey) fell in linewith what he said in the passage above. Why did he think itnecessary to criticize his earlier view of history? He had been reading Nietzsche all along, and Hegel, and Sartre. These were constants in his education while Dewey was a variable.

Foucault often answered questions about why, based on present motivations, he had written on a given historical

things present, a present of things to come. In the soul there are these three aspects of time, andI do not see them anywhere else. The present considering the past is memory, the present considering the present is immediate awareness, thepresent considering the future is expectation.

St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 235 (Bk XI, Ch. 26). The connection between historicity and history of the present is a complex one calling us towards the most complex issues surrounding the nature of time.68. Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, p. 232.69. Ibid., 232.

topic. Prior to his time in Tunisia, the answers were usually very academic, following the pattern “I wanted to examine the relation between x and y.” After Tunisia this changed. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault did not wait for an interviewer to ask why he had written a history of the prison, but offered a statement, or more accurately, a manifesto in introducing the book. Why did he write a history of the prison? “Simply because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of thepast in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing thehistory of the present.”77 We are given little explanation of what Foucault means by this, but his reading audience in France would have needed no further explanation. On February 8, 1971, Foucault was involved in founding the

70 As tempting as it is to enter into an analysis of power inrelation to Foucault and Dewey, I shall have to leave this off for the present. Of course, the definitive collection of Foucault’s writings on the topic of power in English is the recently published collection of writings, Essential Writings of Foucault, Volume 3: Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000). A number of excellent studies in this subject have been published in the past. See Todd May, Between Genealogy and Epistemology: Psychology, Politics and Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault (University Park, PA: ThePennsylvania State University Press, 1993); Karlis Racevskis, Michel Foucault on the Subversion of the Intellect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); and Randall McGowen, “Power and Humanity, or Foucault among the Historians,” in Reassessing Foucault, eds. Colin Jones and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1994), 91-112.

Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons. In the speech made at Saint-Bernard Chapel, Foucault said:

We propose to let people know what prisons are: who goes there, and how and why they go; what happens there; what the existence of prisoners is like, and also the existence of those providing surveillance; what the buildings, food and hygieneare like; how the inside rules, medical supervision and workshops function; how one gets out and what it is like in our society to be someone who does get out.78

The G.I.P. quickly became famous for its loud demonstrations, manipulation of the media to its ends, and its on-going war with the penal branch of the government --particularly with regard to political prisoners.79 Discipline

and Punish, appearing four years later, was an extension of this political activism, and it was to be used as a tool in service of that same activity. In brief, it was a history of the present, written on the basis of an intelligent principle of selection --one which enabled it to serve the

71. Ibid., 234.72. Ibid., 235.73. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 6 ff.74. Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 234.75. Foucault, “Revolutionary Action: ‘Until Now’,” in Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Interviews and Essays by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977),219.76. Ibid., 220.

stated ends of the historian. In this way, it was quite unlike Foucault’s earlier institutional histories.

The co-founding of the G.I.P. was Foucault’s first self-initiated step into political activism, and it surprised many people. He remained active in this general cause until his death. The difference between a history of the present and an ordinary history of the past is that the former can resist institutional inertia, while the latter either consciously or unconsciously capitulates to the discursive practices and institutional structures which giverise to it. History of the present chooses its battles and its region of resistance carefully, intelligently. History of the past is an instrument of institutional memory which covers over its own selective activity --it has been taught to do so through institutionalized discursive practices themselves. History of the present can be either conservative or liberal, active or passive. History of the past is always already conservative and passive.

I think Dewey is to some degree an influence regarding Foucault’s entry into political life, and that this manifests itself in a broadening of Foucault’s method in

77. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 31.78. Foucault, “Création d'un groupe d'information sur les pri-sons,” in Esprit, March 1971, 531-532; cited by Eribon, 225. Cf. also Macey 257-259; Miller 187-194.79. A full summary of the G.I.P.’s activities, and Foucault’s role in it can be found in Eribon, 224 ff.

historiography --from passive to active historiography. It would not be difficult to show that Foucault’s penchant for digging up long-forgotten documents and thematizing them pointed him squarely in the direction of the conception of “history of the present” from the beginning. I cannot deny this, but the circumstantial evidence suggests that the catalyst may have been Dewey.80 This is the historical point to be made, but the philosophical significance of thisrelation between French and American thought must be left unstated for the present. It can be indicated, however, by noting that both Foucault and Dewey believed that philosophyhad to fulfill a role of criticism with regard to culture and society. Philosophy simply is the on-going critique of the present for both thinkers.81 In one of his last works, Foucault says:

. . . I have been seeking to stress that the thread that may connect us with the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to the doctrinal elements, butrather the permanent reactivation of an attitude --that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era.82

For Dewey as well, philosophy must be transformed into an on-going criticism of the present which employs that tradition in productive ways. Dewey says:

Philosophy, then, is a generalized theory of criticism. Its ultimate value for life experience

is that it continuously provides instruments for the criticism of those values . . . that are foundin all aspects of experience.83

The most fruitful way to pursue the relation between French and American thought in the present is to follow out the implications, politically and philosophically of what Foucault and Dewey say here. Is philosophy now doing what Foucault and Dewey believed it should do? Are those who specialize in the history of philosophy producing intelligent histories of the present? Are those who specialize in contemporary philosophy keeping their work

80. Upon surveying the evidence and comparing this to his personal recollections, Professor Deledalle was led to say that Foucault “probably owes to Dewey his idea of a history of the present, and possibly, partially at least --and to Sartre-- the idea of playing a leading role (which was repugnant to him) . . . among the Parisian intelligentsia.” Personal letter to the author dated Nov. 14, 1991.81. As nearly as I can determine, the most likely source of this idea in Dewey is Josiah Royce, who said that “philosophyis essentially a critism of life” in The Philosophy of Loyalty (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 14. Whitehead asserted the same thing about the function of philosophy in a book that appeared while Dewey was writing Experience and Nature, but I do not know whether Dewey read it; he never referenced it, in any case. See Whitehead, The Principle of Relativity: With Applications to Physical Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 5.82. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed.Paul Rabinow (Pantheon Books, New York: 1984), 42.83. Dewey, Experience & Nature, rev.ed. (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1929), xx.

close enough to concrete human experience to make for a meaningful critique of present human experience? If the answer is “no,” as I suspect it is in general, then there ismuch work to be done with ourselves. We may begin by askingourselves what are the tacit implications of the last article we each wrote. Are we being pulled along by the institutional inertia of the university? To what end?

Historicity and the History of the PresentIf the philosophy profession, and academia generally,

stands indicted for failing to write self-conscious histories of the present, it may be due to the fact that thedevelopment of philosophical consciousness has not spread, or has even regressed, in the past thirty to forty years. What is required in order to write a genuine history of the present? A part of what previous pragmatists have failed todo in writing about postmodern Continental thought, according to Stuhr, is to take seriously enough the lessons about limits to metanarratives and discursive practices thatpostmodernists have right. Pragmatists are loathe to examine their own metanarrative and see the fault lines, to let the dialectic collapse under its own weight. I claimed I would respect this lesson, and here I shall try to keep that promise. Perhaps herein also lies the keeping of the promise that something philosophically (not just historically) important can come from an examination of Foucault and Dewey of the sort carried out above. Do I

believe Dewey influenced Foucault? Well, what difference would that make? And that is the question pragmatists can pose to themselves that brings them into dialogue with postmodern critique. To answer the question, I ought to pose another: What would I do with such a belief if I could engender one? And another: Under what conditions would anyone be able or likely to agree? The followers of Foucault will take no notice of this study, and would take no notice even were it far more definitive in terms of evidence than it is. It just isn’t sufficiently French. Pragmatists might notice, but what could they do with the knowledge or the belief apart from griping as they already do about the elitist attitudes of the French Fog? No, the pragmatists might believe, but not in the best pragmatic sense of belief –a principle of action. If the relationshipbetween Dewey and Foucault can be construed as knowledge, then it will be because some power can be exercised upon itsbasis. Let us pursue this in a roundabout way.

What, then, is required to write a history of the present? I mentioned near the beginning that Dewey and Foucault had both emerged from Hegelian mentoring, but a consideration of the ways in which they moved beyond Hegel here is important for grasping the history of the present. Had Hegel not already anticipated this sort of history in his “Introduction” to The Philosophy of History? In describing the relations among “original history,” and the four types of “reflective history” (universal, pragmatic, critical, and

fragmentary), Hegel might have appeared to place his weightyattention upon “history of the present” and to classify its natural breaks.84 These categories, according to Hegel, were to be distinguished from “philosophical history,” or the story of the “Bildung” of Spirit.

I do not believe that Dewey’s and Foucault’s notions ofhistory of the present fall within the schema Hegel developed. I would be inclined to call views such as Dewey’s and Foucault’s “post-philosophical history,” and this points up the most important difference. For Hegel, the work of the philosopher was not essentially critical (certainly critique was involved, but not the central task, which was synthetic); for Dewey and Foucault (as for Kant and Marx), it is, and synthesis becomes syntheses. History of the present cannot be “pragmatic” or “critical” history as Hegel described them, not only because these sorts of history are sub-philosophical in his view, but also for a reason he never considered: the immediate consciousness and reflective consciousness of the author of a genuine history of the present, in the sense I use the term, is formed in the afterglow of the Hegelian achievement itself (and its Marxist consequences). History after Hegel becomes a weaponas much as a process –or as Dewey called it, a tool. Dewey and Foucault could no more achieve a truly pre-Hegelian

84. See Hegel, The Philosophy of History, revised ed., 1-8; for a more recent translation cf. Reason in History, trans. R. S. Hartman (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 3-10.

consciousness than they could achieve a pre-Homeric one. Not only is a certain naïveté lost in post-Hegelian philosophical consciousness, but the historicity --with all itsambiguities-- of a history of the present provides the very ground upon which the history itself is written. Thus, there can be only two sorts of histories written today; histories of the present, which recognize themselves as such, and histories of the present which do not. There is no escaping the historicity of our present form of consciousness, and regardless of what name we give to this --whether we call it the universal historical standpoint as Jaspers did, or say with Ortega that human beings have no essence, they have a history-- the point is the same. The issue is not whether philosophical history in Hegel’s sense is or ever was truly possible, but what sort of tool shall history be in reforming and criticizing the very discursive practices which made it possible. As Foucault suggested in Les mots et les choses, the present age is l'âge de l'histoire, one which presupposes the modern subject as both the object of knowledge and the condition for the possibility of any act of knowing. We might idly wonder what is beyond such an age, but the best strategy for the moment is to recognize itfor what it is and to work towards an adequate, which is to say an exhaustive self-consciousness of it. Ironically, this is what Hegel thought he had achieved. But might it not be possible to achieve for the present form of philosophical consciousness what Hegel achieved for the

last, what Jaspers called a “decisive consciousness” of the age?85 Would not such an achievement necessarily entail a transcendence of the dialectic between an immediate (poetic or ironic, with Heidegger or Rorty) consciousness of the ageand the self-consciousness of it?

Yet, this is a great deal to hope for, since our historicity is exhibited across such a broad temporal and spatial field, and not only in a conscious appropriation of the totality of the field of relations between immediate consciousness and its dialectical partner (reflective self- consciousness) --which is the dynamic exhausted in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Lectures on the History of Philosophy, after whichwe may shake the Hegelian dust from our sandles. Rather, the historicity of genuine histories of the present, and what distinguishes them from merely “reflective histories,” in Hegel’s sense, lies in the self-conscious employment of the metaphors which give the text its basic structure, not just as intelligible universals (or the concrete Begriff, which Hegel had already done), but as self-consciously intelligible universals. For instance, Dewey knew perfectlywell that “growth” (which is an inescapable idea in Dewey), or “a loss of nerve” were metaphors appropriated from the organic domain and superimposed upon his post-philosophical historical anthropology, such as one finds in The Quest for 85 See my analysis of Jaspers on this point in “The Wind We Inherited: God and Secular America” in The Personalist Forum, 11:2 (Fall 1995), 98-101.

Certainty. Dewey did not engage in this exercise as a pre-Hegelian, but as a post-Hegelian. His work in and on history is not innocent reflection; it is work undertaken infull comprehension of the limits of language.86

Foucault, like Dewey and Nietzsche, had an affinity forself-consciously employing metaphors from the natural world.He initially chose archaeological and even geological metaphors, but after reading Dewey, shifted to metaphors that were more easily imported into the specifically human domain (e.g., “genealogy”). Also an important indicator is that from Heidegger he borrowed the metaphor of “care.” Heidegger had used this consciously as a metaphor in Being

and Time, but Foucault’s use of it is self-consciously metaphorical, a case of Rortyan irony, but not with the end

86. I think that Stephen Pepper was thinking along the same lines in his notion of the “root metaphor,” in World Hypotheses(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1942), and also importantly elaborated in Concept and Quality: A World Hypothesis (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1966). The contemporary work in cognitive linguistics by such thinkers as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, while it does not rise to quite the same level of understanding as one would find in Foucault, Dewey or Pepper, is nevertheless a good example of the self-conscious employment of intelligible universals. See Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Stephen Fesmire has done a good bit of work towards relating this general viewpoint to a more Deweyan context. See Fesmire, “What is Cognitive about Cognitive Linguistics?” in Metaphor and Symbolic Acitivity, 9:2 (1994), 149-154; and “Aerating the Mind: The Metaphor of Mental Functioning As Bodily Functioning,” in Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 9:1 (1994), 31-44.

of edification. Foucault’s ends were other than Rorty’s. They were more like Dewey’s. Heidegger seemed to believe that he was literally speaking about “care,” a kind of care that made other kinds possible for das Mann. But Foucault knew better.87 Not only the importance of these metaphors from the standpoint of immediate consciousness and reflective self-consciousness comes into play, but also, Foucault appropriates their significance for poetic and philosophical consciousness. All of these levels are brought to bear upon the subject matter of a genuine historyof the present. Such a history is really not a possibility before Hegel had exhausted the structural possibilities of what he called “philosophical history.” The road towards this sort of history was opened by Vico and Hume, and fueledby Herder, but it found its completion in Hegel.88 But it no longer has a place in the world. It is belated.

Therefore, Foucault and Dewey join in creating total histories of the present, post-philosophical histories. In

87. See Foucault, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1986), 43-45. Here Foucault alludes to Heidegger by bringing up the “art of existence,” but does notname him in explaining his employment of the term “care.”88. An interesting book has been written comparing the philosophies of human nature and history among these three thinkers. See Leon Pompa, Human Nature and Historical Knowledge: Hume, Hegel and Vico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). I have many reservations about Pompa’s views, and about the quality of his research, but that a scholar has noted this connection is important in my view.

this same sense any story about Dewey’s influence upon Foucault must also be a post-philosophical history. We ought to grasp it in terms of its way of employing history self-consciously to an end. In this case I claim that the end is freeing thinking. Whether anyone believes I know what I mean when I say that, or whether this exercise is oneof edification is beyond my control, but it would be beyond my control even if I claimed it were not. But whether such a claim as “Dewey influenced Foucault” has power depends upon whether it is thought to be knowledge, and in post-philosophical histories, that amounts to asking whether the tool of history has been effectively employed upon itself. The claim is more constituted in its historicity than in itshistory, since the former is the condition of the latter. Such is the paradox of post-philosophical histories, and this by way of an admission that I really do not know if Dewey influenced Foucault, but I think it is valuable to think of their relation in this way for other than simply antiquarian reasons. I do know, in the sense of being willing to act upon, the idea that the Parrhesiast, the “truth-teller,” in Foucault’s sense of the term, is a desideratum today, especially compared with other strategiesof deploying power/knowledge, such as flying passenger planes into tall buildings.89

89. I would like to thank my colleague Thomas Alexander of Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, for reading severalversions of this paper and offering extensive and useful ctiticism; Donald P. Verene and James Gouinlock of Emory University also offered helpful guidance in the writing of this essay. Gérard Deledalle of the University of Perpignon provided me with much needed information, encouragement and copies of several of his books. John J. Stuhr of Pennsylvania State University answered important questions for me, and directed me to some valuable sources, and along with Professor Stuhr, Edmund Jacobitti of Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville and Robert Hollinger of Iowa State University read and commented on the manuscript. I must alsothank David R. Hiley for helping me to initiate this project at the University of Memphis in 1988, for his sobering and sober advice since, and for directing me to some important sources I had missed. Paul Rabinow of U.C. Berkeley also answered questions, for which I thank him.