Michel Foucault by Taylor Diana;

Author:Taylor, Diana;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1886870
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Spiritual practices

Foucault’s historicizing of the Western subject leads him to ancient Greek and Hellenist forms of subjectivity in his final works. In his 1981–82 Collège de France course, The Hermeneuticsof the Subject (2005a), he clearly points out that the ancient saying “you have to know yourself” (gnothi seauton) was grounded in something other than the search for one’s inner truth. It was interwoven with the “care of the self” (epimeleia heautou), a tradition which we seem to have forgotten since modernity.

The label “care of the self” is, from 1976 onwards, used by Foucault to articulate ancient practices which aim for self-improvement in relation to an ethical way of life. Ethics in antiquity was a strong structure in itself, relatively autonomous in regard to other structures. It consisted of vocabularies that were intended as guides for the concrete shaping of oneself as ethical subject. The striving for self-knowledge concerned one’s position and one’s behaviour, so as to be able to transform oneself “in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (Foucault 1997d: 225). Here we have a subject that is not the deep self of the disciplines but rather a more superficial self, which strives for the ethical coherence of its acting. Through constant practising or “ascesis”, by way of “technologies of the self” such as writing exercises, meditation and dialogue with oneself, one tries to create an “ethos”. This personal ethics (the word ethos meaning literally “character” in Greek, referring to one’s personality) is not only a matter of thought; instead, it is “a mode of being for the subject, along with a certain way of acting, a way visible to others” (1997e: 286). It is in this context that Foucault again uses the concept of spirituality.

The work of Pierre Hadot, classicist and colleague of Foucault at the Collège de France, is of importance here. Hadot, in his approach to classical philosophy, emphasizes the fact that philosophy in antiquity for a large part consisted in “spiritual exercises”. To indicate that ancient philosophy was a way of life that engaged the whole of existence, Hadot considers the term “spiritual” the most appropriate:

It is … necessary to use this term, I believe, because none of the other adjectives we could use – “psychic,” “moral,” “ethical,” “intellectual,” “of thought,” “of the soul” – covers all the aspects of the reality we want to describe … the word “thought” does not indicate clearly enough that imagination and sensibility play a very important role in these exercises.

(1995: 81–2)

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