Ong liked to characterize his own thought as phenomenological and personalist in cast. He regularly uses the term "noetic" to signal the epistemological bent of his thought about cultural history, just as Foucault regularly uses the terms "archaeology" and "genealogy" to signal the bent of his historical investigations.
Now, in the year in which Foucault died (1984), he published an essay titled, in English translation, "What is Enlightenment?" the same as the title in German of an essay that Kant published in 1784 (Gutting, page 55). According to Gutting, "Thinking for ourselves [in Kant] means reasoning" (page 57).
However, even though neither Gutting nor Foucault explicitly adverts to Ong, Ong refers to Kant and other Enlightenment practitioners of the so-called Art of Reason in his all-important 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, mentioned above. But does Ong's detailed historical study of the conceptual background of the Art of Reason practiced by Kant and others count as an archaeological investigation or as a genealogical investigation in Foucault's terminology? Or does Foucault just dismiss Ong's massively researched study or just ignore it in considering the question about the Enlightenment?
But Gutting says, "But what does this question mean? The Enlightenment was a distinctively modern movement, directed towards using reason to free mankind [sic] from the constraints imposed by traditional authorities intellectual, religious, and political. In his essay, Kant said that the point of Enlightenment was to overcome our 'immaturity' by daring to think for ourselves (sapere aude), rather than accepting the authority of others" (pages 55 and 57).
Now, in Ong's 1958 essay "Voice as Summons for Belief: Literature, Faith, and the Divided Self," which he reprinted in his 1962 book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (pages 49-67), he highlights certain points from Gabriel Marcel's discussion of "belief in" versus "belief that" (pages 55-56) a contrast discussed by other authors as well, but not by Kant or Foucault. In a nutshell, Ong aligns certain points that Marcel makes about "belief in" (a person) with the aural dimension in the visual-aural contrast and certain other points that Marcel makes about "belief that" (a propositional statement is true) with the visual dimension in the visual-aural contrast.
I want to quote the following passage from Ong's essay because it is relevant to Kant's essay "What is Enlightenment": "Of the knowledge which individual men [sic] have today, almost all of it is grounded in faith. The knowledge of scientists themselves is almost all grounded in faith, well founded and rational faith in the reports of their fellow scientists, but faith nevertheless. Of the scientific knowledge which any man has, only a tiny fraction has been achieved by his own direct observation. For the rest, he has good reason to believe THAT it is true because, within the limits of their competence, he believes IN his fellow scientists reporting on their work or reporting reports of the work of others. Thus even in the most 'objective' of fields, in actuality the word of persons is more pervasive than factual observation. Science itself cannot live save in a network of belief. Even in science, where fact is more determinative, presence is nevertheless more pervasive than fact" (page 57; my capitalization here replaces his italics).
What Ong says here about scientific knowledge applies, mutandis mutatis, to philosophic knowledge and all other forms of knowledge.
Ong's 1958 essay is also reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, mentioned above (pages 259-275).
Now, Gutting says, "Foucault redirects his discussion from Kant on Enlightenment to Baudelaire on modernity" (page 57). According to Gutting, "the shift reflects what Foucault sees as some crucial difference between our situation and Kant's. Our (Baudelairean) modernity is a historical development from Kant's Enlightenment, but one that has substantially transformed it" (page 58).
Now, we could align what Foucault says about our Baudelairean modernity with what Ong says about the Romantic Movement in philosophy, literature, and the arts in his book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Cornell University Press, 1971), most notably in "Romantic Difference and the Poetics of Technology" (pages 255-283).
In any event, Gutting succinctly sets for his understanding of Kant and post-Kantian philosophy (pages 54-66). Then Gutting says, "I conclude, then, that even in his most apparently philosophical moments, Foucault is not a participant in the debates of modern post-Kantian philosophy" (page 66). But perhaps "the debates in modern post-Kantian philosophy" are the problem.
As I mentioned above in connection with Ong's thought about personal and cultural structures that he variously styles as polemical (1967) or agonistic (1981), both Plato and Aristotle refer to one part of the human psyche as thumos (or thymos). Mutandis mutatis, the power tendencies that Foucault discusses involve what Plato and Aristotle refer to as the thumos (or thymos) part of the human psyche a part of the human psyche that may not be expressly adverted to in "the debates in modern post-Kantian philosophy."
In any event, Ong "is not a participant in modern post-Kantian philosophy," not "even in his most apparently philosophical moments" in his 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, mentioned above.
Later, Gutting says that "following on the work of Pierre Hadot, his colleague at the College de France, he [Foucault] sees ancient philosophy as fundamentally a way of life rather than a search for theoretical truth" (page 108).
See Hadot's book Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, edited with an introduction by Arnold I. Davidson, translated by Michael Chase (Blackwell Publishing, 1995; orig. French ed, 1987).
Speaking of philosophy as a way of life, the British classicist Edith Hall has just published the book Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life (Penguin Press, 2019).
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