Abstract
Foucault is typically seen as having rebelled against the previous generation of French philosophy, which was dominated by existential phenomenology, and by Sartre in particular. However, the relationship between these two generations and between these two philosophers is more complex than one of simple opposition. Through a refracted focus on Foucault’s late work on Greco-Roman philosophy and on the themes of the practice of the care of the self and the freedom associated with that practice, I argue that Foucault—whose philosophy is centered around the problematization of site-specific processes of subjectification— is closer to existentialism than he seems.
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Notes
One might suggest that the line “Man is always the same” gives Sartre’s game away.
Nietzsche's uneasy membership in the “existentialist” tribe is fortunate for existentialism, since he questions many of its propositions and prejudices.
Following a Nietzschean maneuver derived above all from a certain reading of classical philosophy, there is an intimate connection between ethics and aesthetics for Foucault. Clearly sympathetic to a Stoic truth buried by the Christian problem of purity, ethics really is coextensive with the “aesthetics of existence” for Foucault (cf. 1997: 274). To specify the connection as succinctly as possible, this means that questions about a good life are inseparable from questions about a beautiful life (by extension, questions about justice are inseparable from questions about grace (my use of this last term is asserted under the auspices of beauty rather than a Christian semiotics).
Foucault is interested in sexuality (and diet, etc.) as an armature or indicator of the subject’s identity in the West. This is why he says, “I must confess that I am much more interested in problems about the techniques of the self and things like that than sex… sex is boring” (1997: 253).
In a famous response to non-philosophical critics asking if he is going to change his positions yet again, a character in a book written by Michel Foucault writes, “‘Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write’” (2002: 19).
“Perhaps I’ve insisted too much on the technology of domination and power. I am more and more interested in the interaction between oneself and others, and in the technologies of individual domination, in the mode of action that an individual exercises upon himself by means of the technologies of the self” (1997: 225).
In “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” Foucault describes The Care of the Self as “separate from the sex series” (1997: 255).
One of Foucault's gambles—a sacrifice of history for tactics—was that he tended to present discursive formations as having neater, cleaner borders than were ever actually there. Perhaps in this late work he finally no longer found it efficacious to do so.
Several points here: First, philosophically, the Stoic tradition is an eclectic one. Second, as a backdrop to ethics, Stoic cosmology is such that part of the process of establishing a relation with one’s self is establishing a relation with everything else that exists (i.e., these processes are coextensive with each other). Third, the most important concept in Stoic psychology is that of the hegemonikon, the “ruling principle” or “directing mind”. This is the philosophical part of the Stoic soul, which shapes the self, and in so doing is also continually cultivating and refining itself.
This is perhaps what unconsciously prompted existentialism to nail things down in the somber, self-serious concepts that Foucault found so objectionable. For Foucault, Sartre in particular represented a synthetic microcosm of the entirety of modern philosophy, from Descartes through Hegel, with, really, neither enough Nietzsche nor enough history stirred in as an antidote.
For a note regarding the meeting point between the ancient and the Christian, cf. Foucault (2005: 247).
It is useful to keep in mind that Stoics were disdainful of the practice of dialectics, since the basic coordinates of living were, for them, a reflection of a lucid understanding of nature and were thus not open to full-on interrogation. What was open to interrogation was one’s relation and response to those coordinates, not the coordinates themselves.
Eidetic variation was a philosophical technique introduced by phenomenology. Foucault may have dispensed with phenomenology, but he spent his career engaged in something like eidetic variation on the interlocking themes of subjectivity, freedom, truth, and power, which—the variation—is one way of indicating why literal-minded critics accused him of inconsistency. Cf. footnote 5.
For the moment, and leaving aside footnote 13, let us leave the complicated issue of Foucault’s relation to phenomenology out of the picture.
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Seitz, B. Foucault and the Subject of Stoic Existence. Hum Stud 35, 539–554 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-012-9223-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-012-9223-3