as life itself.”32
A second and not unrelated example of a thinker redressing the imbalance between his personal and social life is that of John Dewey. Around the period 1914–1915, Dewey found that he could not write for more than a few hours without suffering fatigue and deep depression. After consulting with F. M. Alexander, Dewey realized that while philosophy was relatively easy for him, he wrote, as he lived, without much thought. This habitual disconnection of mind from body, or thought from activity, was the probable cause of his enervation and depression. Under Alexander's guidance, Dewey not only improved his vision, posture, breathing, and general well-being; he received immediate sensory confirmation of his relational theories of body-mind, thinking-within-activity, the organism-in-nature, ideas-in-context, and schooling-in-society. One of Dewey's most compelling ideas, confirmed by practicing the Alexander technique, was that we do not act on the basis of ideas; rather, ideas are retrospective commentaries on actions that have paid off. For example, it is impossible for a golfer to learn to keep her eye on the ball by being told to do this and becoming self-conscious of her tendency to lift her head when swinging the golf club. She must first acquire new habits of using her body—a series of small, mindful, controlled movements that will, as a matter of course, involve keeping the head still and the eye on the ball. Speaking of the difficulty of learning how to stand up straight, Dewey writes:
Only when a man can already perform an act of standing straight does he know what it is like to have a right posture and only then can he summon the idea required for proper execution. The act must come before the thought, and a habit before an ability to evoke the thought at will.33
To behave decently, lose weight, stop drinking, or sit straight we cannot simply conceive the idea and then will or wish it into being; we must first have the experience, and this demands that we stop thinking about what we want to achieve in order to acquire, “through a flank movement,”34 techniques for how we may inhibit old habits and instill new ones.
Does this mean that reason is synonymous with rationalization—a way of providing ex post facto justifications to actions that were not principled, pondered, or chosen? And if thought is more often afterthought than forethought, how does it differ from storytelling, which is another way we give retrospective form to experiences that defied our understanding and lay outside our control?
Consider Totem and Taboo, a work that Freud regarded as one of his greatest achievements. Despite its intellectual ingenuity and scientific pretensions, this work goes well beyond the little that was known about early hominid evolution, even in 1916, and must be read as largely mythological.35
In the earliest state of human society, according to Freud's scenario, “a violent and jealous father…keeps all the females for himself and drives away his sons as they grow up.” One day, the excluded sons band together, kill their father, and, since they are cannibals, devour him. In consuming the body of the father, the sons “accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength. The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind's earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of many things—of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion.”36 Freud assumed that the sons felt contradictory emotions toward their father. The sexual desire and lust for power that led them to hate and then murder him was followed by a resurgence of the affection and respect they had also felt toward him. Filled with remorse, the sons attempted to revoke their deed by forbidding the killing of the totem, “the substitute for their father; and they renounced its fruits by resigning their claim to the women who had now been set free. They thus created out of their filial sense of guilt the two fundamental taboos of totemism, which for that very reason inevitably corresponded to the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex.”37
It is a central tenet of psychoanalytic theory that even when our thinking appears to represent the external world as it actually is, it is freighted with subjective meanings. In effect, experience-distant language, or the invocation of history, prehistory, or societies remote from one's own, subtly disguises experience-near preoccupations that analysis may be able to disclose. What unconfided, personal issues, then, lie buried in Freud's Totem and Taboo?
In a remarkable essay, Derek Freeman proposes that Freud projected his own ambivalence toward his father onto the “imagined parricidal sons of the primeval Cyclopean family” in order to alleviate his own Oedipal guilt.38 Though he had written Totem and Taboo in a state of “certainty and elation,” Freud became depressed after completing it as though, writes Freeman, he felt guilty at having succeeded in doing something his relatively uneducated father could never have done or understood, even though he had long been driven to demonstrate to his father (who often told Sigmund that he would amount to nothing) that he was worthy of his respect. Freud's reaction, however, was to doubt and demean his achievement, as though this might restore the filial piety and submissiveness appropriate in a son. Even though Freud expressed uncertainty as to whether his thesis in Totem and Taboo was a fantastic hypothesis or based on an actual event, he clung to the reality of the primal deed, writing in the last year of his life that, “I hold firmly to this construction.”39 Modern prehistory provides no evidence that Freud's descriptions of early hominid social life were correct. Modern genetics refutes his assumption that psychical experiences like guilt can be genetically transmitted from one generation to another. And Freud's conflation of contemporary “primitive peoples,” children, and obsessional neurotics is absurd. Yet one has to allow that thoughts generated by a thinker's own inner conflicts can serve as ways in which the thinker works through those conflicts and as ways in which others, whose personal situations are quite different, may comprehend and cope with their particular issues. Such is the case with Freud's model of the Oedipus complex. For though it may have had its genesis in Freud's relationship with his own father, it has served countless others since Freud's time in understanding their own vexed relationships with authority figures, as well as the poignant paradox of the human condition—that the advent of all new life heralds the inevitable passing of the life that made it possible.
Whether our thoughts are concrete or abstract, fantastic or factual, they inevitably reflect who we are and the situations in which we live. Thought is a coping strategy, a way of getting some purchase on experiences that elude our grasp, some distance from experiences that are too close to be clearly seen. But though thinking, like storytelling, begins within our hidden or intimate lives, it finds consummation in the public realm—connecting with others whose incipient thoughts and stories spring from comparable experiences. This is the only sense we can give the term objective—the sense not that our thinking or storytelling has attained a final or an eternal truth, but that it has connected with the thinking and storying of others, and thus made coexistence more possible in a plural world. “This is what I call philosophizing,” writes Henry Miller in his essay on Herman Keyserling. “It is something other than making philosophy—something plus.”40
I confess that it is this “plus” that has always fascinated me as much as the manifest content of any philosophical or anthropological work; the sense that it is the work of a person struggling to become what she is before she is a thinker, to make sense of her situation, to speak rather than be silent, to act rather than remain passive, and, above all, to connect with precursors and contemporaries and so create a sense of human solidarity in a world that is all too often chaotic, incomprehensible, and divided.
These considerations inform James Miller's great biography The Passion of Michel Foucault. Not only does the word “passion” suggest that this thinker, who had erased the subject from the anonymous field of discourse “like a face erased by sand at the edge of the sea,”41 had, ironically, constructed himself as a subject in the course of his intellectual labor; it presages an exploration of how profoundly Foucault's philosophy (logos) implicated a biography (bios). “His oeuvre…seemed to incorporate both his books and his life,” James Miller writes, “and the one could not be understood—least of all philosophically—apart
