Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) August 14, 2021: Recently I read the 2021 English translation of Michel Foucault's posthumously published unfinished but substantially completed book Confessions of the Flesh: The History of Sexuality: Volume 4, translated by Robert Hurley; edited and with a "Foreword" by Frederic Gros (orig. French ed., 2018).
Now, David Macey (1949-2011), the author of Lacan in Contexts (1988), has written a fine 600-page book about The Lives of Michel Foucault (1993). Indeed, like most people, but perhaps to a greater degree than most people, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) did live a life that can be viewed as many lives. Foucault's many lives emerge in Macey's biography from Macey's accounts of the various philosophical and cultural contexts of Foucault's life, including his life as a Nietzschean philosopher and cultural historian and his life as a political activist and polemicist from May 1968 onward.
As I will explain below momentarily, Macey perceptively aligns Foucault with Nietzsche. In addition, Macey is aware of Foucault's unfinished but substantially completed now posthumously published book Confessions of the Flesh (pages xx and 466).
However, neither Macey nor Foucault happens to advert explicitly to the relevant work of the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955). Even though both Macey and Foucault frequently advert to the Renaissance, both authors fail to advert to Ong's massively researched Harvard doctoral dissertation about the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572). Ong traced the formal study of logic from Aristotle up to and beyond Ramus.
For Foucault's interest in the history of logic, see Macey, pages 166-167, 504, and 547. However, according to Macey's account of numerous publications by Foucault, Foucault frequently refers to the Renaissance and discusses certain aspects of Renaissance thought in positing his periodization pattern that typically starts with the Renaissance and then proceeds with subsequent periods he constructs. Consequently, it was a significant departure from his established practice of starting with the Renaissance as the period from which he discussion of subsequent periods proceeds, when he turned to ancient Greek and then to ancient Roman and then to ancient Christian thought in, respectively, volumes 2 (1984a), 3 (1984b), and 4 (2018) of The History of Sexuality.
Now, Ong's massively researched dissertation was published, slightly revised, in two volumes by Harvard University Press in 1958:
(1) Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. The Art of Reason in Ong's subtitle refers to the Age of Reason (also known as the Enlightenment). In short, Ong sees Ramus and his allies as the intellectual predecessors of such Enlightenment figures as Descartes (1596-1650), Locke (1632-1704), and Kant (1724-1804). See Macey's "Index" for specific page references to Descartes (page 588) and Kant (pages 593-594; but see esp. 88-90).
(2) Ramus and Talon Inventory. This inventory is a briefly annotated bibliography of more than 750 printed books by Ramus and his allies and his critics (most of them in Latin, the lingua franca of the Renaissance) that Ong tracked down in more than 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe.
Now, to track down volumes in Continental Europe, Father Ong for three full years (November 17, 1950, to November 16, 1953) was based in Paris at the Jesuit residence of the Jesuit-sponsored journal Etudes. During that time, Father Ong took his final vows in the society of Jesus (known informally as the Jesuit order) on February 2, 1953.
Because Macey fleshes out the French cultural and Continental philosophical contexts in which Foucault emerged, Macey's book also provides valuable contextual information about the French culture in which Ong immersed himself during the three years he lived in Paris.
Now, Ong's contributions to French culture did not go unnoticed in Foucault's time in the limelight in French culture, after he had completed his two theses to attain his French educational and philosophical credentials at the Sorbonne in 1961. In a ceremony on February 22, 1963, at Saint Louis University, where Ong taught English, M. Jean Beliard, Consul General of France, acting in behalf of the French Ministre de l'Education Nationale, dubbed Ong a knight as Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Academiques for "services rendered to French culture."
For discussion of Ong's philosophical thought in his massively researched 1958 book and in his subsequent books and articles, see my lengthy OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020):
Later in Ong's life, he wrote a splendid "Introduction" to Milton's Logic (1672), which Ong and Charles J. Ermatinger translated, in volume 8 of Yale's Complete Prose Works of John Milton: 1666-1682, edited by Maurice Kelley (1982, pages 139-407).
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