by Gary Gutting
Accordingly, for the Christian, subjection to a code of sexual ethics was a matter of absolute exclusion, in the ideal of celibacy, or, at least, for the less heroic, restriction to the strictly limited domain of monogamous marriage. For the ancients, by contrast, it was a matter of the proper use (chresis) of pleasures; not avoiding certain essentially evil actions but engaging in the full range of sexual activities (heterosexual, homosexual, in marriage, out of marriage) with proper moderation (given, of course, the understanding that we are speaking of free males, not women and slaves).
In order to live according to their code of sexual behaviour, the ancients tried to attain self-mastery (enkrateia), victory in a struggle with oneself, achieved by the training (askesis) provided by exercises in self-control. For Christians, the battle was with outside forces of evil – ultimately Satan – that incite desires, and victory was through a radical understanding (hermeneutics) of the self that was the basis for a renunciation of this self in favour of God: not self-mastery but self-denial. Finally, the telos of ancient ethical life was moderation (sophrysune), understood as a form of freedom – both negative (from one’s passions) and positive (as mastery over others). For Christianity, the only humanly meaningful freedom sought was the negative freedom from desires; beyond that there was merely total surrender to the will of God.
The sharp contrast with Christianity applies most to Classical Greeks views of the 4th century BC. Later (early Empire) views of sexuality remain, according to Foucault, basically the same but with increasing emphases in the direction of Christian negativity. So, for example, although ta aphrodisia are still regarded as intrinsic goods, there is far more insistence on their dangers and on our frailty in face of them. Similarly, the techniques of self-mastery (enkrateia) remain central but are increasingly connected to self-knowledge, and into the ideal of sophrysune there is incorporated an element of contemplative satisfaction. Particularly through Stoic philosophy, the Roman world was planting seeds of the Christian revolution.
Foucault’s account of Christian sexuality seems to ignore the central doctrine of the goodness of creation. Even Augustine, who would have to be a major source for the anti-sexual view Foucault outlines, insisted, against the Manichaeans, that there was nothing intrinsically evil in the world. Even the Fall, according to orthodox Catholic doctrine, did not radically corrupt any aspect of human nature, and all of creation, including our sexuality, is redeemed by Christ. Foucault might, of course, argue that these metaphysical and theological doctrines did not determine practical ethical teaching. But we would need to have his detailed account of medieval sexuality to know what he really thought.
I suggested earlier that at the end of his life what Foucault still called genealogy was becoming a kind of philosophy. I can best develop this thought by commenting on Foucault’s final overall characterization of his work, in the Preface to The Use of Pleasure. He now maintains that, from the beginning, he has, on the broadest level, been developing a ‘history of truth’. He conceives this history as having three main aspects: an analysis of ‘games of truth’ (that is, various systems of discourse developed to produce truth), both in their own right and in relation to one another; an analysis of the relation of these games of truth to power relations; and an analysis of the relation of games of truth to the self. We can readily identify the study of games of truth in their own right, as systems of discourse, with archaeology, and the analysis of their relation to power with genealogy. Here ‘games of truth’ refers to the various bodies of knowledge (real or would-be) that were the concern of Foucault’s histories. It might seem natural to extend this sense of ‘games of truth’ to Foucault’s connection of them with problematizations, taking as the relevant games the philosophical theories that the ancient Greeks developed as solutions to the problems of human existence.
However, although Foucault does indeed see philosophy as the Greek response to problematizations, he does not see philosophy in this sense as a matter of developing a body of theoretical knowledge. Rather, following on the work of Pierre Hadot, his colleague at the Collège de France, he sees ancient philosophy as fundamentally a way of life rather than a search for theoretical truth. ‘Games of truth’, in this context refers not to systems of thought but to practices of telling the truth. The Use of Pleasure discusses Plato’s appeal to the love of truth as the purified ideal behind the homoerotic love of boys. Plato, however, has at least a strong tendency to treat philosophy as a theoretical vision rather than just a way of life, and Foucault is careful to keep his distance from this sort of Platonism.
The title of Foucault’s last book, The Care of the Self, refers to a major theme in the practically oriented philosophical schools of later antiquity, particularly the Stoics, but the book is mostly concerned with the theme in non-philosophical contexts, such as medicine, marriage, and politics. However, Foucault treats philosophy as a way of life explicitly and in detail in lectures he gave (in 1982 and 1983) at the Collège de France and at Berkeley. In the Collège de France lectures, he discusses Socrates (in the Apology and in Alcibiades I) as both a model and an exponent of the philosophical life focused on ‘care of the self’ and follows the subsequent ancient discussions of this topic in, for example, Epictetus, Seneca, and Plutarch. The Berkeley lectures discuss the ancient ideal of ‘truthful speaking’ (parrhesia), regarded as a central political and moral virtue. Here Foucault discusses earlier formulations of the notion, in Euripides and Socrates, as well as its later transformations by the Epicureans, Stoics, and Cynics.
We have these lectures only through transcriptions of tapes (and listeners’ notes). Their coverage is incomplete and their formulations preliminary. We have no way of knowing how Foucault would have transformed this raw material had he ever decided to publish it. But it seems at least that here, at end of his life, Foucault had finally found a way to move beyond what, varying Paul Ricoeur’s famous phrase, we might call the epistemology of suspicion. All his previous work had, as he claims, been about truth, but, in contrast to the traditional philosopher’s unconditional love of truth, Foucault put truth to the test. His archaeologies show how it is often relative to the contingent historical frameworks it is supposed to transcend, his genealogies how it is entwined with the power and domination from which it is supposed to free us. Now he finds a way to embrace truth, not as a body of theoretical knowledge, but as a way of living: not an epistemology, but an ethics, of truth.
14. Foucault in a cowboy hat that his students at Berkeley gave him, October 1983
But what does Foucault mean by ‘living the truth’? Not, of course, modelling ourselves on a pre-set ideal pattern, determined by, say, God’s will or human nature. His study of the ancients, as we have seen, suggested two alternatives: truth as the product of individual self-creation on analogy with art; and truth-telling as a social virtue. Here, at the very end, we find again what may well be the defining dichotomy of Foucault’s life and work: the aesthetic or the political?
References and further reading
Introductions
For an introductory overview, see my articles on Foucault in Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1998) and Edward Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (web-based: http://plato.stanford.edu/).
Helpful collections of articles on Foucault include David Hoy (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) and Gary Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For some mostly French perspectives on Foucault, see Arnold Davidson (ed.), Foucault and his Interlocutors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
General references
Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Todd May, Between Genealogy and Epist
emology: Psychology, Politics, and Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).
Lois McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction (New York: Continuum, 1994).
John Rajchman, Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
Chapter 1
There are three full-length biographies of Foucault: Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, tr. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); James Miller, The Passions of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993); and David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Pantheon, 1993).
The two striking titles mentioned (and well worth reading beyond the titles) are Patricia Duncker, Hallucinating Foucault (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1996; reissued, New York: Vintage, 1998) and Maurice Blanchot, ‘Foucault as I Imagine Him’, translated with Foucault’s essay on Blanchot, ‘The Thought from Outside’, in Foucault as I Imagine Him and the Thought from Outside, tr. Jeffrey Mehlman and Brian Massumi (New York and London: MIT Press, 1987).
For a good introduction to Raymond Roussel’s life and work, see Mark Ford, Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2000). Among translations of Raymond Roussel into English, see Trevor Winkfield (ed.), ‘How I Wrote Certain of My Books’ and Other Writings, introduction by John Ashbery (Boston: Exact Change, 1995) and Locus Solus, tr. Rupert Copeland Cunningham (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970).
Foucault nicely expresses the idea of his work as a toolbox in the following comments in a 1974 interview about his expectations for Discipline and Punish:
I want my books to be a sort of toolbox that people can rummage through to find a tool they can use however they want in their own domain … I want the little book that I plan to write on disciplinary systems to be of use for teachers, wardens, magistrates, conscientious objectors. I don’t write for an audience, I write for users, not readers.
(‘Prisons et asiles dans le mécanisme du pouvoir’, DE II, 523–4, my translation)
‘Truth, Power, Self’, an interview with Foucault, appears in L. H. Martin et al. (eds), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).
Chapter 2
The title quote is cited in Eribon’s biography, p. 58.
Bataille’s best-known novel (and a focus of Foucault’s ‘Preface to Transgression’) is The Story of the Eye, tr. Joachim Neugroschel (San Francisco: City Lights, 1987). For a selection of Bataille’s other writings (essays and fiction), see Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (eds), The Bataille Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). Also see Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, tr. Krzysztof Kijalkowski and Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 2002).
For a selection of Blanchot’s writings, see Michael Holland (ed.), The Blanchot Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). For a perceptive discussion of Blanchot, see Gerald Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
Georges Perec’s famous e-less novel, La disparition (1969), has appeared in English as A Void, tr. Gilbert Adair (London: The Harvill Press, 1994). For more on the Oulipo movement, see Warren Motte (ed.), Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998).
Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable is part of a trilogy of novels available in his own translation from the original French as Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Malloy, Malone Dies, and the Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1995).
For a good general discussion of Foucault’s relation to literary modernism, see Gerald Bruns, ‘Foucault’s Modernism’, in Gary Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Chapter 3
The title quote is from an interview with Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics’, EW I, 256.
The references for the passages from Sartre are: Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume I, tr. Alan Sheridan (London: New Left Books, 1976); and two collections of essays, Between Existentialism and Marxism, tr. John Mathews (New York: Pantheon, 1983) and Situations, tr. Benita Eisler (New York: Braziller, 1965). The Critique is Sartre’s massive and obscure effort to synthesize existentialism and Marxism; the two collections are more accessible, and could serve as a good introduction to Sartre’s thought. On Sartre and Foucault, see Thomas Flynn, Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason, two volumes (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997, 2005).
Foucault’s introduction to Binswanger’s essay is available in English (along with that essay) as Dream and Existence, tr. Jacob Needleman (New York: Humanities Press, 1986).
Foucault’s first book, Maladie mentale et personnalité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954), was later revised (eliminating the Marxism) and published as Maladie mentale et psychologie, translated by Alan Sheridan as Mental Illness and Psychology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
The Marxist book on punishment that Foucault mentions in Discipline and Punish is Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939).
For Richard Rorty on Foucault, see ‘Foucault and Epistemology’ in David Hoy (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); and ‘Foucault/Dewey/Nietzsche’ in Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Chapter 4
The title quote is a remark made by Foucault at the University of Vermont, 27 October 1982. It is cited by Allan Megill, ‘The Reception of Foucault by Historians’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 48 (1987), 117.
On the Annales school of historiography, see Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–89 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1991) and François Dosse, New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales, tr. Peter V. Conroy, Jr (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
Andrew Scull’s critical comments about The History of Madness occur in his article ‘Michel Foucault’s History of Madness’, History of the Human Sciences, 3 (1990), 57.
For Roy Porter’s critique of Foucault’s work on madness, see ‘Foucault’s Great Confinement’, History of the Human Sciences, 3 (1990), 47–54. For a discussion of historians’ critiques of Foucault on madness, see Gary Gutting, ‘Foucault and the History of Madness’, in Gary Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For a good collection of essays on Foucault as a historian, see Jan Goldstein (ed.), Foucault and the Writing of History (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994). Foucault’s friend and colleague, the Roman historian Paul Veyne, offers a strong appreciation of Foucault’s historical work in ‘Foucault Revolutionizes History’, in Arnold Davidson (ed.), Foucault and his Interlocutors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Chapter 5
The title quote comes from an interview with Foucault, ‘The Return of Morality’, in PPC, 251.
Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality is available in an excellent English translation with good explanatory notes by Maudemarie Clark and Alan Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998). For a good commentary on the Genealogy, see Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (New York: Routledge, 2002). See also Walter Kaufmann’s translations in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 1992), and Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th edn. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
‘Critical Theory/Intellectual History’ is an interview with Foucault, available in PPC.
Chapter 6
The title quotations are from ‘Philosophie et psychologie’, DE I, 438 and UP, 9.
For an interesting but controversial interpretation of Foucault as a critical philosopher in the Kantian tradition, see Béatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical (California: Stanford University Press, 2003).
On Foucault
and phenomenology, see Todd May, ‘Foucault’s Relation to Phenomenology’, in Gary Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
For more on Foucault’s relation to Bachelard and Cangulihem, see Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chapter 1.
On Foucault and Heidegger, see Hubert Dreyfus, ‘Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 4 (1996), 1–16.
On Sartre versus Heidegger on humanism, see J-P. Sartre, ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, in Walter Kaufmann (ed.), Existentialism from Dostoyevski to Sartre (New York: Meridian, 1984) and Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Basic Writings (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).