Let me now go back a bit in Foucault's text and quote the reasoning by which he reaches that conclusion. He says, "Let's stand back a bit again. For centuries there existed a theme the banality of which induces weariness, which is that ultimately everyone is a bit of a philosopher.
"It is a theme immediately dismissed by philosophical discourse in order to develop the theme that philosophy is a specific task, set back and at a distance from all others, and irreducible to any other. But it is a theme no less regularly taken up again by philosophical discourse in order to assert that philosophy is nothing other than the movement of truth itself, that it is consciousness becoming aware of itself - or that the person who wakes up to the world is already a philosopher.
"But we should note that this theme, ever dismissed and taken up again, of a philosophy linked to the first movement of knowledge in general, is a theme which would have appeared very foreign to the first Greek philosophers. But more importantly we can see the function it performs: there is already contemplation in the crudest and most physical knowledge; it is this contemplation, then, that will lead to the whole movement of knowledge according to its specific logic or the necessity of the object it contemplates. As a result, desire is elided along with its effectiveness. Desire is no longer cause, but knowledge that becomes cause of itself (on the basis of the idea, or of the sensation of obviousness, or of the impression, no matter) - cause of itself and of the desire directed towards it.
"And as a consequence, the subject of desire and the subject of knowledge are one and the same. The sophistical problem (the person who does not yet know and desire cannot be the person who knows and no longer desires) is erased. The strange discussion of the Euthydemus in which the Sophist says: 'If you want your friend to learn, he must no longer be the same, he must die,' this ironic irruption of death between the subject of desire and the subject of knowledge, can be erased, for desire is no more than the scarcely perceptible quivering of the subject of knowledge around what he knows. The old millennial theme of 'everyone is more or less a philosopher' has a precise and ascribable function in Western history; it is a matter of no more or less than sealing up the desire to know in knowledge itself" (page 18).
Happy Fourth of July!
For a bibliography of Ong's 400 or so distinct publications (not counting translations and reprinting as distinct publications), see Thomas M. Walsh's "Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006" in the book Language, Culture, and Identity: The Legacy of Walter J. Ong, S.J., edited by Sara van den Berg and Thomas M. Walsh (New York: Hampton Press, 2011, pages 185-245).
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