In contrast to Sartre, later in his career Foucault shifts his focus to individuals’
conscious experiences as his starting point. Foucault describes his third method for examining subjectivity as follows: “[I]nstead of referring to a theory of the subject, it seemed to me that one should try to analyze the different forms by which the individual is led to constitute him or herself as a subject.”267 In a historical context very unlike his study of the prisons, Foucault examines some of these forms of subjectivity in Greek, Hellenistic, and early Christian culture in his lecture series The Hermeneutics of the Subject. In these lectures, Foucault examines the philosophical attitude of “care of self”
through the different forms it took in each of these historical periods. In this study, Foucault reveals that this philosophical attitude was a practice, a principle which formed the rationale for various forms of conduct. Caring for self involved a range of tests, meditative practices, and actions through which one attained self-knowledge.
Foucault argues that beginning with Plato and then solidifying with Descartes, modern Western philosophy has understood the Greek proposition “know thyself”
(gnothi seauton) as the primary means of access to truth, while overlooking that in
267 Foucault, GSO, 5.
ancient thought, gnothi seauton was only possible in conjunction with “care of self”
(epieleia heautou). When Descartes introduced the self-evidence of the subject’s
existence as the foundation for knowledge, gnothi seauton became the sole starting point for accessing the truth. Gnothi seauton, with Descartes, was no longer a form of
knowing oneself in terms of care of and self-knowledge, but a matter of the impossibility of doubting one’s own existence.268 Foucault believes that the Greek mandate to care for oneself played an equally important role in how the Greeks understood the path to truth, as caring for oneself was the “justificatory framework, ground, and foundation for the imperative ‘know yourself.’”269
Foucault argues that the era guided by the principle of “care of self” included a sense of spirituality that we have lost today. Spirituality, he says, refers to the:
[S]earch, practice, and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself in order to access the truth…[Spirituality]
postulates that the truth is not given to the subject by a simply act of knowledge (connaissance)…It postulates that for the subject to have right of access to the truth he must be changed, transformed, shifted, and become, to some extent and up to a certain point, other than himself.270
In ancient Greek, Roman and Hellenistic thought, individuals did not simply receive the truth by studying different bodies of knowledge. Subjects were required to perform practices on themselves in order to be capable of receiving the truth. A philosophical way of life that incorporated spirituality required active work upon oneself to make oneself different and capable of receiving the truth. After the Cartesian turn, access to the truth became possible through the autonomous development of knowledge as
268 Foucault, Hermeneutics, 14.
269 Ibid., 8.
270 Ibid., 15.
connaissance, and no longer required preparing oneself to receive the truth.271 Thus, while Foucault expresses admiration for care of self and the role it played in Greek, Roman, and Hellenistic subjectivity, the requirement to change oneself in order to be capable of knowing is not a part of our modern mode of thinking, speaking, and doing.
The care of self is, Foucault says, a way of considering things, behaving in the world, and relating to others. Such a care was a careful examination of what we think and what takes place in our thought. Further, it required a series of actions performed upon oneself such as techniques of meditation, memorization, examination of
conscience, rites of purification, techniques of withdrawal, practices of endurance, and preparation for death.272 Foucault is particularly drawn to the Hellenistic era of practices of the self, referring to it as the “golden age in the history of the care of the self.”273 In the Hellenistic period, care of the self became a universal principle, applicable to everyone in every stage of life.274 Foucault believes that this was a privileged moment in terms of the relationship of the subject to truth.
The Hellenistic period was characterized by self-conversion, which involved the intention “to live with oneself, to ‘dwell in oneself’ and to remain there.”275 Through this practice, subjects gained independence and self-control, and experienced self enjoyment. Training to care for the self as a practice served several functions: a critical function, in which one must rid oneself of bad habits and false opinions; a function of struggle, in which the practice of self was conceived of as an ongoing battle for which
271 Foucault, Hermeneutics, 24.
272 Ibid., 10-11.
273 Ibid., 81.
274 Ibid., 83; also, 254.
275 Ibid., 495.
one must be prepared to fight for one’s entire life; and a curative function, a matter of healing the soul.276 For example, the Epicureans prepared for life’s possible events by knowing the principles that govern the world, the nature of the gods, the laws of nature, and the causes of life and death. These beliefs were accompanied by a system of
thought, expressed through discourse, about our place in the natural order of the world.
These discourses were meant to be available to subjects when they needed them and were appropriated through various methods: memory, listening, reading, writing, and mental exercises for retaining what one had learned.277 True ideas were not simply passed from an expert to an individual who received them passively. The truth about us and the world was not directly accessible, but was attainable only after subjects prepared themselves to receive it.
For example, Foucault identifies the most famous thought exercise as the meditation of future evils, which was practiced diligently by the Stoics. This practice involved not only imagining the very worst thing that might happen, no matter how unlikely, but also envisaging that this awful thing had already occurred, such as the death of one’s child. Through this process, subjects could convince themselves that these things were not actually real evils, but only appeared to be due to the individuals’
worldly attachments.278 For practices of testing oneself, Epictetus, for example, introduces a method of controlling representations and being vigilant over one’s thoughts, in order to practice reactions to specific situations, such as the death of a relative:
276 Foucault, Hermeneutics, 496-497.
277 Ibid., 500.
278 Ibid., 469-473.
[T]he aim of this control of representations is not to decipher a hidden truth beneath appearances, which would be the truth of the subject himself. Rather, [Epictetus] finds in these representations, as they appear, the opportunity for recalling a number of true principles concerning death, illness, suffering, political life, etcetera.279
Foucault considers the meditation on or training for death as the very height of these practices. The Hellenistic philosopher Seneca was very experienced in the death meditation, ordering one to live each day as if it were the span of one’s whole life. One assumes each day to be one’s last, but in assuming it, one reflects back on one’s life as a whole. This exercise allowed the subject to see one’s present from above or
“immobilize the present in a snapshot.”280 This meditation also provides a retrospective view of one’s whole life, enabling one to grasp the value of the present moment and comprehend one’s life as a totality.281
In his third axis, Foucault exemplifies subjects’ own participation in the creation of the truth about themselves, others, and the world. He also demonstrates how
differently thought, knowledge, and truth were conceived of and practiced in a previous period. During this epoch, the justificatory framework for access to the truth was one of active involvement and self-creation. Our contemporary modes of subjectivity, by contrast, do not include this kind of spirituality and take place in an epoch where our social practices are intertwined with mechanisms of discipline and biopower.
279 Foucault, Hermeneutics, 504.
280 Ibid., 479.
281 Ibid., 480.