Foucault’s Pragmatism and Dewey’s Genealogies: Mapping Our Historical Situations and Locating Our Philosophical Maps [Part II]

Abstract

In Part I, I focused on the pragmatic facets of Foucault’s genealogies. In particular, I highlighted the extent to which experience in a sense very close to the way Dewey used this term was central to Foucault’s project. In Part II, I focus on the genealogical aspects of Dewey’s pragmatism. This however entails also turning our attention from “practices of freedom” (to use Foucault’s expression) to the efforts of Dewey and Foucault to map the historical terrain of human practices, especially the discursive practices of traditional philosophers, for the sake of pointing out unexplored possibilities. The patient, imaginative exploration of such possibilities is connected to the practices of freedom. Moreover, emancipating our practices often requires us to redraw the maps in which these practices might be both reconfigured in their relationship to one another and liberated from some of their inherited goals. For example, the practice of philosophy (precisely as an instance of a practice of freedom) might be weaned from not only the quest for certainty but also any aspiration to transcend the contingencies of history. Put positively, philosophy might transform itself into, first and last, a critical engagement with the historical present, for the sake of transforming or transfiguring that present. Insofar as it can do this, philosophizing effectively transforms itself into a practice of freedom.