The World of Freedom by Nichols Robert

Author:Nichols, Robert [Nichols, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2014-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

SIX

THE SUBJECT OF SPIRITUALITY

It is not so much what you are doing as how you are doing it. When we properly understand and live by this principle, while difficulties will arise—for they are part of the divine order too—inner peace will still be possible.*

Epictetus

The transition from aletheia to ethos (from true discourse to what will be the fundamental rule of conduct) begins of course with listening.

Michel Foucault

IN THIS CHAPTER, by drawing out critical possibilities in Foucault’s late work in relation to Heidegger, I articulate the inter-relationship between an ontological analysis of selfhood and care and a historical analysis of subjectivity. In the previous chapter, we saw that rather than thinking of freedom as a feature or property of the subject, Foucault’s late position was more that it named a particular kind of situation or relationship to a determinant field or clearing of meaning and action. Freedom is “worldly” in this sense.1 Yet ambiguities persist. In particular, it is not clear what makes this kind of relationship possible, what brings it into being and sustains it. At first read, Foucault’s answer appears to be that it is “thought” which makes free relations possible: to oneself, to others, to the historically singular domains of experience that delimit the horizon of one’s intelligible world. The capacity for thought permits the dislodging of the relatively solidified discursive effects that are constitutive of the forms of experience and their related modes of subjectivity. However, stopping there and leaving the analysis at this level leaves one with a position that, while perhaps not antithetical to Heidegger’s interrogation of ontology, at least stands in some direct tension to it. For while thought is given different formulations in different parts of Foucault’s work (from a science or body of knowledge with discursive structural regularities, to a hermeneutic unthought implicit within all action, to a movement of problematization that seeks the historical a priori), the emphasis remains focused on a relatively individualized and intellectualized concept, a “cognitivist picture” connoting an activity of the mind that has an effect on organizing and ordering experience of the world. This implies, at least, that Foucault bypasses or possibly even rejects Heidegger’s critique of cognitivism and the epistemological tradition. And yet Foucault repeatedly stated, particularly in his late works, that Heidegger’s work—especially Heidegger’s interrogation of the relationship between freedom and truth—was of utmost importance to him.

In this chapter I develop an alternative reading in three basic moves. First, I investigate what I will refer to as the “ontological commitments” of Foucault’s analysis of spirituality and care of the self. In the second part of the chapter, I develop a working distinction in Foucault’s writings between “selves” and “subjects,” which is then used to demonstrate linkages to Heidegger’s own account of selfhood and the critique of transcendental subjectivity. Part three attempts to draw out the implications of these developments, particularly with regard to a historical analysis of subjectivity in the West. Since both Heidegger and Foucault are committed to an understanding of selfhood and

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