Sometimes opposing realities dissolve when we see we were looking at the wrong. Sometimes they resolve dialectically. Sometimes they remain in a creative tension. Gadamer gets this and Foucault did not.

I agree with Foucault’s suprahistorical critique insofar as one might, like Hegel, get stuck in a cycle of abductive hypothesizing and deductive clarifying without ever letting the inductive rubber hit the historical road to verify one’s speculations. His critique of Hegel was correct in that regard; also, Hegel was wrong to a priori suppose that all tensions necesarily resolved into synthesis.

Foucault did fall prey to his own critique in his facile subscription to certain dichotomies. The history of science, including social science, does not reveal that our theoretical conceptions are either enforced & repressed or otherwise overthrown in domineering power plays; rather, our concepts are negotiated by the community of inquiry and they usually successfully refer and very often successfully describe reality. Humanity’s trending toward a global ethic does affirm the transformative efficacies of liminal thresholds, but not where power defeats power; rather, we are increasingly, if ever so slowly, privileging the marginalized. Foucault may be right in that reality is not deterministic but there is another option than the nihilistic; reality presents, rather, probabilistically, which is to recognize that we needn’t choose between efficient causality and acausality as scientism and positivism suggest. Instead, modern semiotic science has reintroduced telos, both formal and final causations, even if in a minimalist sense. A telic dimension to human history seems probable to me and vis a vis cosmic history is at least plausible.

Too get modestly onto-theological, an aesthetic teleology or axiological cosmology is at least equiplausible with competing speculations. We can choose between them evaluatively or axiologically. Because we have advanced a rather compelling heuristic in emergentism, which takes into account telos, we have an inductive testing of our neoplatonic intuitions, which gives normative impetus to why their deductive clarifications can be so satisfying. Foucault was right about our not wanting to be suprahistorical but he was wrong to a priori imagine that telos was somehow ahistorical. Ironically, Dionysian logic could have prevented his error of thinking 1) It is | x | or 2) It is | not x | because sometimes, 3) It is neither | x | nor | not x | . And this neoplatonic thread runs through both Augustine and Aquinas, as one can see by returning to one’s roots. I’m suggesting, then, that our neoplatonic sensibilities of telos, even if a somewhat weak analog to the semiotic telos we observe in nature, are neither a priori nor suprahistorical and survive Foucault’s critique even as his own interpretation is self-subverted.