The Public Square: Senecan Moods: Foucault and Nietzsche on the Art of the Self Michael Ure

foucault studies

ISSN: 1832-5203

Foucault Studies, No 4, pp. 19-52, Feb 2007

ARTICLE

Senecan Moods: Foucault and Nietzsche on

the Art of the Self

Michael Ure , Monash University

It is well known that self‐examination and the guidance of conscience

was widespread among … the Stoics and the Epicureans as a means

of daily taking stock of the good or evil performed in regard to one’s

duties … The guidance of conscience was also predominant in certain

cultured circles, but as advice given … in particularly difficult

circumstances: in mourning, or when one was suffering a setback.

(Foucault)1

Introduction

In this epigraph, taken from a lecture he gave during the early stages of his

research into the practices of the self, we find Foucault, the archaeologist of

culture, at work excavating and reconstructing the fragments of the

Hellenistic practices of the self. What he unearths beneath two millennia of

Christian civilization are practices of the self that differ “radically”, as he puts

it, from Christian conscience‐vivisection. Nor, as the epigraph makes clear, do

the cultural practices of self‐cultivation he pieces together from the fragments

of antiquity bear much resemblance, if any, to the vain self‐display and

preciosity of the nineteenth‐century Dandy. Rather, Foucault uncovers a

“golden age of self‐cultivation” in which individuals undertook the work of

the self not in order to attain salvation from this world or aristocratic

distinction within it, but as a therapy that enabled them to remain composed

in the face of the sufferings and losses of mortal life.2

According to Didier Eribon, this excavation of the Hellenistic and

Roman care of the self left an unmistakable mark on Foucault’s writing style.

1 Michel Foucault, ‘Omnes et Singulatum: Toward a Criticism of ‘Political Reason’ in The

Tanner Lectures on Human Values II, ed. Sterling McMurrin (Salt Lake City: University

of Utah Press, 1981), 238, emphasis added. The published essay is the text of two

lectures Foucault delivered at Stanford University on October 10 & 16, 1979.

2 Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon,

1986), 45. (Hereafter CS).

foucault studies, No 4, pp. 19-52

In his last two works, Eribon notes, many of his former admirers and fellow

travellers found themselves disappointed by this change of style, much as a

century earlier Nietzsche’s readers and erstwhile friends were alienated by

the dramatic transformation that Nietzsche’s own turn to Hellenistic

philosophy had wrought on his style. Indeed, this parallel goes further, for

Foucault’s interpreters describe his stylistic shift in almost identical terms to

those that Nietzsche’s critics had employed to define his transformation from

disciple of Dionysus to sober positivist. Foucault’s interpreters, Eribon

reports, contrasted the “fiery” style of his early works with the calm,

dispassionate, “sober” style of his late research on antiquity.3 Eribon claims

that the style of Foucault’s life and work in his last years bears testimony to

the extent to which he assimilated Stoicism, especially in its Senecan moods:

It is as if approaching death and the foreboding he had of it for

several months had led Foucault onto the path of serenity. Seneca,

whose works were among his favorite reading, would have praised

such a model of ‘the philosophical life’. Foucault seemed to have

internalised the ancient wisdom to such a point that it had become

imposed upon his style itself – his style as a writer and his style as a

man.4

The sober, dispassionate style of Nietzsche’s middle works and Foucault’s late

works signpost their return to the conception of the philosophical life and

practice that dominated philosophy from Epicurus to Seneca, that is to say, to

the idea of philosophy as a therapy of the soul. Both turned back to the

Hellenistic therapies as the question of the self, or more specifically and

pressingly, of their “ego ipsissimum,” took centre stage in their thinking.5

3 Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1991), 331. Eribon quotes from Deleuze and Blanchot, respectively. In his last

interview Foucault himself discusses his stylistic change in strangely enigmatic terms;

see Michel Foucault, ‘The Return of Morality’, John Johnston (trans) in ed. Sylvère

Lotringer, Foucault Live: Interviews 1966‐1984 (New York:Semiotext(e), 1989), 317‐331,

317‐318. Paul Veyne also notes that Seneca’s Stoicism played an important role in

Foucault’s “interior life” in his last years as he was living under the threat of AIDS;

see Paul Veyne, Seneca: The Life of a Stoic, trans. David Sullivan (New York: Routledge,

2003) , ix‐x.

4 Eribon, Michel Foucault, 331, emphasis added. According to Paul Veyne, in the last

stages of his life Foucault himself practised this Stoic mode of philosophising and

writing of the self: “Throughout the last eight months of his life, writing his two

books played the same part for him that philosophical writing and personal journals

played in ancient philosophy – that of the work performed by the self on the self, of

self‐stylization” (quoted in Eribon, Foucault, 325). By contrast, James Miller attempts

to downplay the importance of this Stoic turn in Foucault’s work; James Miller, The

Passion of Michel Foucault (London: Flamingo, 1994), 342.

5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits vol. 2, trans. R. J.

Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Preface §1. (Hereafter

Ure: Senecan Moods

Nietzsche in his middle works and Foucault in his last, incomplete researches

both draw on the Hellenistic and Stoic traditions that analyse and treat the

pathologies which threaten to arise from “setbacks” to our wishes, especially

from that “most touchy point in the narcissistic system”: the mortality that

shadows our lives and loves and which compels us to learn how to work on

ourselves and mourn our losses.6 Toward the end of his own life, Foucault

himself was evidently captivated by this motif of Greco‐Roman philosophy:

“That life, because of its mortality, has to be a work of art is a remarkable

theme”.7

Of course, the more common Foucault‐Nietzsche discussions turn on

perceived similarities or linkages in their ideas of power and knowledge,

genealogy and interpretation, will and agency. Indeed, on this latter point,

there is almost universal agreement that the critique of the metaphysics of

subjectivity that forms the theoretical underpinning of Foucault’s thinking in

the 1970s largely derives from Nietzsche’s genealogical analysis of the

fabrication of subjectivity. The disagreements in this debate do not concern

the extent of Nietzsche’s influence on Foucault, but the philosophical validity

and political implications of his Nietzschean‐inspired critique of the

“magisterial illusions of subjectivity”.8 There is also widespread agreement

that in his late texts Foucault once again returns to Nietzsche, but this time to

rescue a positive model of the exercise of subjectivity from his own

unrelenting critique of the illusions of agency; as Keith Ansell‐Pearson

explains:

(I)n his later works on ethics Foucault was to recognise that his notion

of the subject as a mere effect of power constituted one of the major

deficiencies in his thinking, and it was precisely to a Nietzschean

HAH 2). Hollingdale translates ego ipsissimum as “my innermost self”. Nietzsche’s

use of this phrase deliberately underlines the Latin roots of his idea of the care of the

self.

6 Sigmund Freud, ‘On Narcissism’, trans. James Strachey in On Metapsychology: The

Theory of Psychoanalysis, Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 11 (London: Penguin, 1991), 85.

7 Michel Foucault quoted in Timothy O’Leary, Foucault and the Art of Ethics, (London:

Continuum, 2002), 175, footnote 14.

8 Michael Janover, ‘The Subject of Foucault’ in Clare O’Farrell (ed.), Foucault: The Legacy

(Queensland: QUP, 1997), 215‐227. The nature and extent of Foucault’s debt to

Nietzsche’s critique of the metaphysics of subjectivity has been rehearsed too often to

require further elaboration here; for a lucid discussion of this issue see Peter Dews,

Logics of Disintegration: Post‐Structuralism and the Claims of Critical Theory (London:

Verso, 1987); and Peter Dews, ‘The Return of the Subject in the Late Foucault’, Radical

Philosophy, 51, Spring (1989), 37‐41.

foucault studies, No 4, pp. 19-52

aesthetic conception of ethics that he turned in his thinking about an

alternative non‐juridical model of selfhood.9

However, as we have noted, the shift in Foucault’s philosophical

orientation and style derives from a tradition that can be better understood in

therapeutic rather than aesthetic terms. Foucault clouds the true nature and

significance of the Hellenistic and Stoic care of the self insofar as he presents it

as a purely aesthetic project akin to nineteenth‐century Dandyism.10 On the

other hand, if we bracket Foucault’s comments glossing these practices as

purely aesthetic, and examine instead his historical analyses of the care of the

self we discover the clear outlines of Hellenistic philosophy and Stoicism as

philosophic therapeia of the soul.11 In other words, Foucault’s research reveals

a much richer conception of the work of the self than he can capture with this

aesthetic gloss. As we shall see, it is this richer conception of the self that

stands at the centre of Nietzsche’s middle works. Once we suspend Foucault’s

misleadingly aestheticised rendering of the Hellenistic and Roman tradition,

therefore, we can use his historical excavation of the practices of the self to

clarify the ethics of subjectivity (or agent‐centred ethics, to use analytic

parlance) that lies at the heart of Nietzsche’s middle works. Indeed, in his

1981‐1982 lectures Foucault himself suggests in passing that it might be

possible and fruitful to re‐read Nietzsche’s thought as a difficult attempt to

reconstitute the Hellenistic ethics of the self.12 Finally, as we saw above, the

care of the self addresses the psychological traumas of loss and transience,

and it is for this reason that Nietzsche’s renovation of this tradition can be

explicated as a treatment that addresses the loss of narcissistic plenitude and

9 Keith Ansell‐Pearson, ‘The Significance of Michel Foucault’s Reading of Nietzsche:

Power, The Subject, and Political Theory’, in Peter Sedgwick (ed.), Nietzsche: A Critical

Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 13‐30. 26‐27, emphasis added.

10 In his remarkable systematic reconstruction of Foucault’s ethics, Timothy O’Leary

makes a similar point. He claims that Foucault often imposes a nineteenth‐century

aestheticist cult of beauty onto a Greco‐Roman philosophic tradition that was

preoccupied with aesthetics in the much narrower sense of a series of technai

(techniques) for working on and transforming the self, and that he overstates the

extent to which beauty was the telos or aim of these techniques; see O’Leary, Foucault

and the Art of Ethics, 14‐15, 86, 102‐104, 172. For a rigorous account of the Stoics’

technical conception of philosophy ‐ i.e., its understanding of philosophical wisdom as

a technical knowledge analogous to the expert knowledge of the craftsmen ‐ which

functions to transform one’s bios or way of living see John Sellars, The Art of Living:

The Stoics on the Nature and Function of Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).

11 David M. Halperin develops another angle on why we should avoid reducing

Foucault’s aestheticism to Baudelairean or Wildean dandyism; see Saint Foucault:

Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

12 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981‐

1982, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 251. (Hereafter

HS).

Ure: Senecan Moods

its pathological manifestations, which, in one way or another, seek to restore

the magisterial illusions of subjectivity.

Foucault’s recuperation of the Hellenistic care of the self establishes

two points that clear the way to comprehending Nietzsche’s ethics of

subjectivity: (1) that the Christian hostility to pagan self‐love blocks our

comprehension of Hellenistic ethics and continues to pervert the critical

reception of its modern renovations and (2) that the ethics of the care of the

self, properly conceived, is a philosophical therapy guided by the notion that

the self constitutes itself through the voluntary exercise of a range of reflexive

techniques and practices oriented towards treating the affects of revenge,

envy and anger. In sum, Foucault’s recuperation of Hellenistic ethics clarifies

both the general conception of ethical practice and some of the substantive

ethical and psychological issues at stake in Nietzsche’s middle works.

For our purposes, the significance of Foucault’s resurrection of the

Hellenistic and Roman practices of self‐cultivation lies in the way he clears

several obstacles that stand in the path of comprehending Nietzsche’s own

concern with these practices. In the first place, Foucault demonstrates the

extent to which the reception of Hellenistic self‐cultivation has been marred

by Christian polemics against self‐love, which its early theologians consider

the besetting sin of all paganism. These polemics, Foucault shows, have cast a

long shadow over every attempt to recover a positive notion of the work of

the self on itself. In other words, one of the great merits of Foucault’s

excavation of the Hellenistic practices of the self lies in the way it frees the

reception of this tradition from the incrustations of Christian polemics. He

demonstrates that Christianity wrongly interprets Hellenistic self‐cultivation

as closely connected, either historically or analytically, with a “conceited

ontology” that gives license to various brands of hyper‐individualism.13

Foucault’s interpretation of Hellenistic self‐cultivation sets it apart

from individualism understood either as a solipsistic withdrawal into the

private sphere, a crude exaltation of singularity, or, as indeed Augustine saw

it, an inflamed self‐love that blossoms into a love of power over others.14

According to Foucault, an intense labour of the self on itself can, as it did with

the Stoics, fuse with fulfilling one’s obligations to humankind, to one’s fellow

citizens and to a denunciation of social withdrawal.15 Once it emerges from

the shadows of Christianity, he argues, the Hellenistic tradition can be

rightfully seen as a rich vein of philosophical therapy that takes as its starting

13 Romand Coles constructs pagan subjectivity as founded on a “conceited ontology”;

see Romand Coles, Self, Power, Others: Political Theory and Dialogical Ethics (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1992).

14 CS, 42‐43; and Michel Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work

in Progress’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (London: Penguin Books,

1984), 350 (Hereafter GE).

15 CS, 42

foucault studies, No 4, pp. 19-52

point a conception of the subject as a series of reflexive spiritual and material

exercises. We can then recover the remnants of a philosophical therapy, “a

treasury of devices, techniques, ideas and procedures”, focussed on analysing

how the self can work on itself in such a way that it does not rage vengefully

either against the mortal losses it suffers or against those who brim with such

vengefulness.16

It follows that if Nietzsche anchors his middle works in the Stoic

tradition’s intensification and valorisation of the practices of the care of the

self then his ethical project must also be sundered from any necessary

connections with the chain of synonyms that Augustine associates with this

tradition: perverse self‐love, love of domination, apostasy from God and the

sin of pride.17 If this can be established then it is also plausible that those

critics who equate Nietzsche’s ideal of self‐cultivation with narcissistic self‐

involvement and/or grandiose exaltation of the self over others, merely

reprise Christianity’s moral and hermeneutic prejudices against the

Hellenistic arts of living.

Secondly, Foucault’s schematic presentation of the concepts and

practices of Hellenistic self‐cultivation, especially his analysis of the Roman

Stoics, can be used to clarify the extent to which Nietzsche takes up not just its

general ethical orientation, but its substantive conception of the work of the

self.18 Like the Hellenistic thinkers, Nietzsche conceives this ethics as a

continuous, difficult and sometimes painful labour that the self performs on

itself, rather than as a heightening of narcissistic self‐preoccupation. We can

measure the distance between narcissistic self‐absorption and self‐cultivation

by the fact that both the Hellenistic thinkers and Nietzsche see it as a labour

mediated through social practices that draw on and enrich the bonds of

friendship.19 Nietzsche’s ethics of self‐cultivation also rests on the central

organising principle of Hellenistic discourse: its analogy between the arts of

medicine and philosophical therapy. Nietzsche follows the Epicureans, but

especially the Stoics, in charting the movements of the soul as a series of

cycles of illness, convalescence and health, in conceptualising philosophers as

doctors to the soul, and in employing medical metaphors to designate the

operations necessary to perform the care of the soul.

Foucault’s research opens up an ethical perspective that, with the

exception of Nietzsche’s middle works, modern philosophy has until very

16 GE, 349

17 John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient thought baptised (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1994), 190.

18 The analysis here follows CS, 39‐68.

19 For an excellent synopsis of Nietzsche’s shifting reflections on and evaluations of

friendship see Ruth Abbey, ‘Circles, Ladders and Stars: Nietzsche on Friendship’ in

Preston King and Heather Devere (eds.), The Challenge to Friendship in Modernity

(London: Frank Cass, 2000), 50‐73.

Ure: Senecan Moods

recently neglected.20 Yet his reconstruction of the ethics of the care of the self

is marred by the conceptual limitations and blindnesses of his own

formulations of an aesthetics of existence. Foucault’s recasting of the work of

the self in terms of Baudelairean Dandyism or the freedom of undefined,

unrestricted self‐invention, elides something fundamental to this ethics: viz.,

the fact that it addresses the pathos that arises from mortality and loss, and

that it does so in order to identify, temper and overcome the individual and

political pathologies that arise from these wounds to our narcissistic wish for

immortality and omnipotence. In closing, this paper suggests that we can

establish a better grasp of Stoic and Nietzschean ethics of subjectivity by

framing their central concerns in terms of the psychoanalytic problem of

narcissism, its pathologies and cures, rather than, as Foucault does, in terms

of aesthetic modernism’s ideal of radical creativity. Both the Stoics’ and

Nietzsche’s ethics of the care of the self, it is argued, can be seen as attempts

to analyse and overcome various pathological expressions of the desire for

narcissistic omnipotence. If this is so, then we must sharply demarcate both

from the aesthetic modernist currents that Foucault advocates. By framing his

aesthetics of existence in terms of the Baudelairean Dandy’s feline “cult of

oneself as the lover of oneself”, the paper argues, Foucault reduces the idea of

the self as a work of art to a personality tour de force, and in the process he

suppresses the important therapeutic and psychological concerns that both

the Hellenistic thinkers and Nietzsche made central to the work of the self on

itself.21 To state the difference in bold terms, the Stoic and Nietzschean ethic

of self‐constitution analyses and attempts to treat narcissism, whereas

Foucault’s Baudelairean aesthetic self‐fashioning is merely a symptom of

narcissism.

oucault: Classical, Roman and Modern Arts of Living

rnment in

mappi

Foucault’s critics and defenders in philosophy and social theory, rarely, if

ever, recognise that his historical investigation of subjectivity uncovers a

series of quite different practices of ethical self‐constitution, rather than a

single, uniform art of living.22 They devote most of their interest to

demonstrating that his history of practices of self‐constitution contradicts his

earlier genealogical unmasking of humanist notions of a centred, self‐

determining subject. As a result, they have shown much less disce

ng the historical terrain that Foucault covers in this research.

20 On this point see Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in

Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994), 4‐5.

21 See Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, trans. Christopher Isherwood (San

Francisco: City Lights Books, 1983), 49.

22 For an exception to this rule see O’Leary, Foucault and the Art of Ethics, Ch. 3.

foucault studies, No 4, pp. 19-52

Yet an examination of his history of the self suggests that he detects

three quite distinct forms of the artistic elaboration of the self: the Greek or

classical arts, the Roman Stoic practices of self‐cultivation, and the distant

echoes of antiquity he claims to discover in Baudelaire’s Dandyism.23 His

critics particularly neglect the distinction he draws between the classical

Greek and Roman arts of living. In casting doubt on the contemporary

significance or desirability of these ancient practices commentators invariably

frame their concerns in terms of the classical Greek practices. “In what way” as

one critic asks “is the liberty of the Greeks ours?”24 According to Foucault,

however, the Stoics of the imperial age significantly modified the classical

Greek arts of existence. Stoicism, so he argues, refined and reworked pre‐

existing classical forms. It did so, he suggests, by refashioning the way in

which subjects recognised themselves as ethical subjects, the ascetic practices

which they used to constitute themselves as subjects, and the very telos of

those practices.25 Unlike the classical practice of self‐fashioning, as he sees it,

Stoic self‐cultivation was not pursued for the sake of exercising domination

over others or attaining personal glory. For the Stoics, caring for oneself was

not a prelude to, a primer for, or an analogical representation of political

authority.26 Rather, he claims that Roman Stoics like Seneca and Epictetus

conceived self‐cultivation as an occupation that revolved around “the

question of the self, of its dependence and independence, of its universal form

and of the connections it can and should establish with others”.27 Importantly,

yet seldom noted, Foucault describes this Stoic art of living, as “the summit of a

curve, the golden age in the cultivation of the self”.28 Foucault, in other words,

chroni

cles Stoicism as the crowning glory of the ancient ethics of the care of

the self.

23 Foucault twice mentions the Renaissance arts of living as distant echoes of antiquity,

but this remains nothing more than a gesture. It is impossible, therefore, to assess

whether he believed that a study of these Renaissance practices might yield a distinct

form of self‐cultivation; GE, 362, 370.

24 Christian Bouchindhomme, ‘Foucault, morality and criticism’ in Michel Foucault:

Philosopher, trans. Timothy J. Armstrong (New York: Harvester, 1992), 317‐27, 324;

Andrew Thacker also claims that “(p)erhaps the main problem with Foucault’s map

is that it is a Greek one”; see Andrew Thacker, ‘Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence’,

Radical Philosophy, 63, Spring (1993), 19.

25 Of the four structural features of the practices of the self that Foucault identifies,

Stoicism leaves only the ‘ethical substance’ unchanged; see GE, 357.

26 See HS, 75, 82‐83

27 CS, 238

28 CS, 45, emphasis added; see also CS, 238‐39; GE, 348, 357‐58; and HS, 81. Foucault

seems to have Hegel’s deprecation of Hellenistic philosophy in his sights. Hegel

treats the Hellenistic schools and the Stoic care of the self as little more than poor

substitutes for civic participation in the polis; see Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The

History of Philosophy, trans. J. Sibree (London: George Bell and Sons, 1900), 328; The

editors of Foucault’s 1981‐1982 lectures elaborate this point; see HS, 23, n 47.

Ure: Senecan Moods

While his critics devote much of their attention to contextualising

Foucault’s history of the different practices f the self in terms of its place in

his overall philosophical development and its significance for contemporary

critical theory, they give less attention to his efforts to

reshape the

assum

e what the Greeks called an ethos”.31

Foucault makes the same casual association in lamenting the demise of the

Greco‐

life, one’s

ptions that frame the reception of Greek and Roman practices of the

self, and to his conceptualisation of these practices themselves.29

Foucault contributes to this neglect by blurring the lines that separate

the ancient practices of the self from aesthetic modernist cults of self‐

fashioning. He emblematises modern self‐fashioning through Baudelaire’s

figure of the Dandy. Baudelaire’s decadent self‐absorption is, he claims, “the

attitude of modernity”.30 Glossing over the differences separating Greco‐

Roman technologies of the self from the aesthetic modernist’s manner of

fusing life and art, he describes Baudelaire’s attitude as “a way of thinking

and feeling … [a] bit, no doubt, lik

Roman ethos of self‐stylisation:

We have hardly any remnant of the idea in our society, that the

principal work of art which one has to take care of, the main area to

which one must apply aesthetic values, is oneself, one’s

existence … We find this in the Renaissance … and yet again in

nineteenth century dandyism, but those were only episodes.32

Encouraged no doubt by such cavalier associations, when they analyse

Foucault’s late works his critics also tend to neglect the radical differences

between the Greco‐Roman arts of living and aeshetic modernism. As

Foucault does in this passage, they are inclined to reduce the arts of living to

one undifferentiated category, the “aesthetics of existence”. However,

Foucault’s historical analyses demonstrate that this category conceals a

number of disparate conceptions of the self, each of which demands analysis

on its own terms. This becomes apparent when we examine the philosophical

and ethical chasm dividing the self‐fashioning of Baudelaire’s Dandy and the

ethical practices of Stoicism. Between Baudelaire’s “exclusive cult of the

passions” and Stoicism one could reasonably admit only the very faintest, if

any, family resemblance.33 It is true that in defining Dandyism, Baudelaire

briefly touches on its penchant for stoic gestures, but the accent he places on

29 See for example Rainer Rochlitz, ‘The Aesthetics of Existence: Post‐conventional

morality and the Theory of Power in Michel Foucault’ in Michel Foucault: Philosopher,

248‐59.

30 Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader

(London: Penguin Books, 1984), 33‐50 (Hereafter WE).

31 WE, 39

32 GE, 362, emphasis added.

33 GE, 421

foucault studies, No 4, pp. 19-52

originality and excess demonstrates just how far removed this ethos is from

Stoic philosophy and morals. The grandeur of folly and excess Baudelaire

describes in the following passage is antithetical to the Stoic ideal of rational

self‐ma

mixture of the grave

d n

acknowledge the significant differences between the various artistic practices

stery:

It is, above all, the burning desire to create a personal form of

originality, within the external limits of social conventions. It is a kind

of cult of the ego … A dandy may be blasé, he may even suffer pain,

but in the latter case he will keep smiling, like the Spartan under the

bite of the fox. Clearly, then, dandyism in certain respects comes close

to spirituality and to stoicism, but a dandy can never be a vulgar man.

If he were to commit a crime, he might perhaps be socially damned,

but if the crime came from some trivial cause, the disgrace would be

irreparable. Let the reader not be shocked by this

and the gay; let him rather reflect that there is a sort of grandeur in all

follies, a driving power in every sort of excess. 34

Here we might invoke one of Foucault’s own rhetorical strategies to

correct his tendency to gloss such differences: while some of the Dandy’s

ascetic precepts and gestures might distantly echo the classical and Stoic arts

of living, the Dandy’s moral ethos in fact defines a very iffere t modalityof

the relation to the self.35 Even if Foucault occasionally fails to adhere to them,

and his philosophic critics rarely recognise them, it is important to

of t self.36 Stoicism’s philosophical therapy should not be confused with the

Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on

Art and Artists trans. by P. E. Charvet (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), 420,

emphasis added. It is worth noting that in Discipline and Punish Foucault took

umbrage at Baudelaire and other nineteenth‐century writers’ recasting of crime as a

game played by the elite for aesthetic stakes, which replaced the far more politically

charged eighteenth‐century popular broadsheets and gallows speeches that had once

served to transform petty criminals into epic heroes and saints. Through literature

like Baudelaire’s Fleur du Mals, Foucault lamented, “the people was robbed of its old

pride in crimes; the great murders had become the quiet game of the well‐behaved”;

see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan

(New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 65‐69, 69. However, if in Discipline and Punish

Foucault laments Baudelaire’s aestheticization of evil and crime, its sublimation into

a literary game for the cultural elite, he does so, according to James Miller, in the

name of a nostalgia for the splendour ofthe carnivals and rituals of cruelty that were

banished from the stage of public life with the emergence and spread

of modern

35 ce of similar precepts in the Late

s it is invoking; see

disciplinary technologies; see James Miller, “Carnivals of Atrocity: Foucault,

Nietzsche, Cruelty”, Political Theory, vol. 18, no. 3 (August 1990), 470‐491.

This is how Foucault argues that despite the presen

Hellenistic practices of the self and early Christianity, they are in fact radically

different ethical systems and practices; see CS, 239.

Martin Jay rightly claims that the analysis of every ‘aestheticisation’ of politics or

existence must begin by identifying what notion of aesthetic

Ure: Senecan Moods

Dandy’s project of elaborating one’s existence according to the principles of

aesthetic formalism, a project fuelled by the desire to establish aristocratic

social distinctions against the rising tide of democratic vulgarity.37 Nor, as we

shall see below, should Stoicism simply be equated with the classical Greek

practices of the self.

In truth, however, Foucault passes over such crucial distinctions in his

pronouncements about the contemporary relevance of the arts of the self.38 By

contrast, his historical analyses of these practices, especially his 1981‐1982

lectures published as The Hermeneutics of the Subject, identify and reinforce the

notion that there are significant discontinuities between these practices of the

self. Indeed, in mining the philosophical, moral and medical texts of

Hellenistic antiquity, Foucault discovers the lineaments of a conception of the

self’s relationship to itself that seems more properly called therapeutic than

aesthetic, or, in which ‘aesthetic’ practices merely serve as part of a larger

philosophical therapy. It is this account of Hellenistic therapy, especially the

Roman Stoics’ care of the self, rather than his fleeting glances towards

Baudelairean self‐invention, that provides a schema for interpreting what

Nietzsche identifies, self‐consciously advertising its Latin foundations, as his

“disciplina voluntatis”.39

The Flaming Gaze of Vanity

In order to excavate and then distinguish the classical Greek and late Roman

technologies of the self, Foucault first had to challenge the Christian polemics

against the immorality of pagan “self‐pleasers”.40 Such criticisms, he observes,

first appeared among the early Church Fathers who cast a suspicious eye on

pagan self‐love. The early Church Fathers, he recollects, saw the care of the

self as a source of diverse moral faults, and gladly denounced it as “a kind of

egoism or individual interest in contradiction to the care one must show

others or the necessary sacrifice of the self”.41 As the inheritors of the

Christian traditions and their secularised derivatives, Foucault claims, ‘we’

moderns easily fall into the trap of conceiving the care of self as intrinsically

immoral:

ean to

Aestheticize Politics?’, Cultural Critique, Spring (1992), 42‐61, 43.

Martin Jay, ‘“The Aesthetic Ideology” as Ideology; or, What Does It M

37 Cesar Grana , Modernity and its Discontents: French Society and the French Man of Letters

in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), 148‐54.

38 On this point see also, Thacker, ‘Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence’, 13.

39 HAH 2, Preface, 2

40 Augustine, City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth,:

Penguin, 1984), Bk. XIV, ch. 13.

41 Michel Foucault, ‘The Ethics of the Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, trans. J.

D. Gauthier, Philosophy and Social Criticism, XII, no. 2‐3 (1984), 113‐131, 115‐116

(Hereafter ECS).

foucault studies, No 4, pp. 19-52

We find it difficult to base rigorous morality and austere principles on

the precept that we should give ourselves more care than anything

else in t e world. We are more inclined to see taking care of ourselves

as an immorality, as a means of escape from all possible rules. We

inherit the tradition of Christian morality which makes self‐

renunciation the condition of salvation … We also in

herit a secular

tradition which respects external law as the basis of morality. How

r itself the less it has for others, he argues, merely sums up in

quasi‐positivistic terms the entire drift of the dominant strand of moral

discou

e the

phenomenon of falling in love as an impoverishment of one’s self‐

discourse. It has impaired our philosophical and ethical thinking, he suggests,

by conflating all self‐love with a disavowal or negation of others.44 One legacy

then can respect or the self be the basis of morality? 42

Erich Fromm supports Foucault’s historical point. According to

Fromm, beginning with Christian theology and reaching through

Protestantism, German Idealism and psychoanalysis, the notion of caring for

oneself or self‐love has been maligned and salvation associated exclusively

with austere self‐renunciation. Freud’s assertion that the more love the ego

reserves fo

rse:

The doctrine that love for oneself is identical with ‘selfishness’, and

that it is an alternative to love for others has pervaded theology,

philosophy and the pattern of daily life … According to Freud, there

is an almost mechanical alternation between ego‐lov and object‐love.

The more love I turn toward the outside world the less love I have for

myself, and vice versa. Freud is thus moved to describ

love because all love is turned to an object outside of oneself.43

Fromm claims that the Christian construction of self‐love as a negation of

altruism has shaped the very foundations of philosophical thinking about the

self’s relationship to itself, including the psychoanalytic conception of the

subject. He argues, as Foucault does in his later works, that Christianity’s

highly charged critique of self‐love profoundly distorts modern ethical

Michel Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self’, in L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, P. Hutton

(eds.), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amhers

t: University of

43 l

k of the International Erich

Massachusetts Press, 1988), 16‐49, 22, emphasis added (Hereafter TS).

Erich Fromm, ‘Selfishness and Sef‐Love’, first published in Psychiatry: Journal for the

Study of Interpersonal Process, The William Alanson Psychiatric Foundation,

Washington, Vol. 2 (1939), 507‐523; reprinted in the Yearboo

Fromm Society, Vol. 5 (Münster: LIT‐Verlag 1994) , 173‐197.

Heinz Kohut’s challenge to the psychoanalytic tradition also supports this point. See

Heinz Kohut, ‘Forms and Transformations of Narcissism’ in Self Psychology and the

Humanities: Reflections on a New Psychoanalytic Approach (New York: W. W. Norton &

Co., 1985), 97‐123. Graham Little sums up his central point nicely “[Kohut’s] heresy

was to think that in certain forms and in certain respects self‐love, the bête noire of

Ure: Senecan Moods

of Christianity, therefore, is the presumption that anything other than the

self’s abasement before God (or his secular representatives) is a symptom of

the pagan vice of pride or self‐love. Foucault sets out to demonstrate that the

Christian conception of the self’s relationship to itself, a relationship in which

the self submits itself to a divine law, is not the only practice through which

the self can constitute itself as an ethical subject.45 “(T)here is,” he

hypothesises, “a whole rich and complex field of historicity in the way the

individual is summoned to recognise himself as an ethical subject”.46

However, unlike Fromm, Foucault also establishes specific historical

sources that make it possible to theorise different practices and discourses of

self‐love. His excavation of classical and Hellenistic practices enables him to

flesh out the claim that, at least in this theoretical and historical context, self‐

love takes the form of a complex work of the self on itself. Christianity’s

polemical interpretation of classicism and Hellenism, he maintains, elides

from our philosophical and ethical heritage a fertile tradition that offers us

alternative images, techniques, ideas and practices for theorising the self’s

relationship to itself. In Greco‐Roman antiquity he discovers an ethical

tradition which accentuates the self’s relationship to itself as its central

concern, and whose philosophies and schools elaborate or invent a series of

practices through which the self becomes an ethical agent. Here the self’s

fashioning of itself is not considered antithetical to, but constitutive of, ethics.

For the classical and Hellenistic philosophers, he argues, ethics is self‐

cultivation.

Fromm and Foucault, then, trace back to Christianity a peculiar torsion in our

ethical discourse: the condemnation of self‐love as the ‘sin’ of self‐deification.

Foucault adds that this torsion has erased the Greco‐Roman ethics of the care

of the self from our ethical landscape. Foucault believes contemporary

attempts to renovate various Greek and Roman conceptions of the arts of

living continue to be stymied by this Christian polemic. In our conception of

the self, according to Foucault, we still live in the shadows of the Christian

God. “There is a certain tradition” as he puts it “that dissuades us (us, now,

today) from giving any positive value to all [the] expressions, precepts, and

rules” concerned with caring for the self, and “above all from making them

the basis of a morality”.47 (If in political theory we have yet to cut off the

psychoanalysis as it had been of religion, could be both a good thing and

psychologically essential”; Graham Little, Friendship: Being Ourselves With Others

(Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 1993), 48.

45 See Michel Foucault, ‘About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self’, Political

Theory, vol. 21, no. 2 (May 1993), 198‐227 (Hereafter BHS).

46 Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon,

1985), 32 (Hereafter UP).

47 HS, 12

foucault studies, No 4, pp. 19-52

king’s head, as Foucault claims, then in the theory of the self we have yet to

he Ethics of the Care of the Self: From Classical Greece to

i e

s concerning codes or interdictions and their

applica

Christianity and antiquity “the topography of the parting

of the

kill God).

Imperial Rome

Foucault’s frst step towards throwing off th constraints of Christian

prejudices against the care of the self is methodological. In order to

understand antique ethics he introduces a tripartite framework for

interpreting the history of morality. In The Uses of Pleasure, he distinguishes

three fields of inquiry, which, he claims, encompass three different realities:

moral codes, moral behaviours and what he calls ethics. The history of moral

codes studies the system of values, rules and interdictions operative in a

given society, the history of behaviours investigates the extent to which the

actions of individuals and groups are consistent with these rules, and the

history of ethics examines the “way in which individuals are urged to

constitute themselves as subjects of moral conduct” and concerns itself “with

the models proposed for setting up and developing relationships with the

self, for self‐reflection, self‐knowledge, self‐examination, for the decipherment

of the self by oneself, for the transformations that one seeks to accomplish

with oneself as object”.48 Simplifying this framework, Foucault identifies a

field of ‘moral’ problem

tion, and another field of ‘ethical’ problems about how the self turns

itself into a moral agent.

According to Foucault, the decisive transformations in the history of

moral experience lie not in the history of codes, which reveals only the

“poverty and monotony of interdictions”, but in the history of ethics, where

this is understood “as the elaboration of a form of relation to self that enables

an individual to fashion himself into a subject of ethical conduct”.49 In

concrete historical terms, he suggests that we can distinguish the Greek,

Roman and Christian traditions not so much in terms of their moral

prescriptions, which, he claims, remain “formally alike”, but in terms of the

different forms of self‐relationships which they encourage individuals to

practice.50 Although Foucault acknowledges that in any attempt to identify

the break between

waters is hard to pin down”, he nonetheless selects two key points of

differentiation.51

48 UP, 29

49 UP, 251

50 UP, 250; see also GE, 355.

51 Foucault quotes Peter Brown in “The Battle for Chastity” in Phillipe Aries and André

Béjin (eds.), Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times, trans.

Anthony Forster (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 14‐25, 25.

Ure: Senecan Moods

In the first place, he claims that although the necessity of respectin

d customs was often underscored in Greek and Roman antiquity,

… more important than the content of the law … was the attitude that

caused one to respect them. The accent was placed on the relationship

with the self that enabled a person to keep from being carried away

by the appetites and pleasures, to maintain a mastery and superiority

over them, to keep his senses in a st

g the

law an

ate of tranquility, to remain free

from interior bondage to passions, and to achieve a mode of being

lf‐elaboration, were

supplem

ve their existence the most

gracefu

that could be defined as full enjoyment of oneself, or the perfect

supremacy of oneself over oneself.52

While Foucault clearly compresses many different conceptions of the practices

of the self into this passage, he nevertheless believes they share a close family

resemblance insofar as they place the accent not on the strict codification of

conducts or the authority that enforces it, but on what is required of

individuals in their relationship to themselves, to their actions, thoughts, and

feelings as they seek to form themselves as an ethical subjects.53 In Greco‐

Roman culture, he argues, both the codes and the practices through which the

self constitutes itself, its forms of self‐examination and se

ents or luxuries that individuals voluntarily adopted. Its various

schools proposed rather than imposed “different styles of moderation or

strictness, each having its specific character or ‘shape’”.54

Secondly, Foucault claims that in the Greco‐Roman tradition the choice

to apply these codes and practices to the shaping of one’s existence, and the

constitution of oneself as a self‐disciplined subject, was determined by the

aim of transforming one’s existence into a work of art. “From Antiquityto

Christianity” he asserts “we pass from a morality that was essentially a search

for a personal ethics to morality as obedience to a system of rules”.55 For the

classical Greeks, for example, sexual austerity was not a matter of

internalising, justifying or formalising general interdictions imposed on

everyone, rather it was a means of developing an “aesthetics of existence”, or

“a stylisation of conduct for those who wished to gi

l and accomplished form possible”.56 In the Greco‐Roman world, this

aesthetic care for the self was, as Foucault puts it, “the manner in which

individual liberty … considered itself as ethical”.57

52 UP, 31

53 UP, 29‐30

54 UP, 21

55 Michel Foucault, ‘An Aesthetics of Existence’, in Sylvère Lotringer (ed.), Foucault Live:

Interviews 1966‐1984, trans. John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 309‐316,

311.

56 UP, 253, 250‐51

57 ECS, 115

foucault studies, No 4, pp. 19-52

However, if we narrow our focus to Foucault’s treatment of ethics

within Antiquity, it quickly becomes apparent that he differentiates between

the classical Greek practices of liberty and the late Roman Stoics’ care for the

self. During the golden age of self‐cultivation, so he claims, important shifts

occur in the mode in which the self recognises itself as an ethical subject, the

ascetic practice through which it constitutes itself, and the goal of its work on

itself. In the classical Greek perspective, he claims, the self defines its

relationship to rules or norms as the means through which it achieves

“beauty, brilliance, nobility, or perfection”.58 Foucault describes this as an

aesthetic mode of adjustment to norms. The Stoics, by contrast, recognise

norms as those which apply to all rational beings.59 Between classical Greek

ethics and Stoicism, he claims, there is also a dramatic shift in the range and

type of ascetic or self‐forming practices. Indeed, he associates Stoicism with a

veritable burgeoning of self‐forming activities, exercises and practices.

Finally, Roman Stoicism changes the telos of ethical subjectivity.60 While the

Roman Stoics, in conformity with the classical tradition, till defin the artof

the self in terms of achieving the rule of the self over itself, “this rule broadens

out into an experience in which the relation to self takes th

s e

e form not only of

domin re or

disturb neself

with a

h c c

ation but also of an enjoyment of oneself without desi

ance”.61 Foucault correlates this shift towards the enjoyment of o

shift away from the goal of domination over others:

I think that t e difference is that in the lassi al perspective, to be

master of oneself meant, first, taking into account only oneself and not

58 UP, 27

59 UP, 354, 356. The classicist Pierre Hadot correctly observes that in treating the

Hellenistic and Stoic spiritual exercises as sources for his own idea of aesthetic self‐

fashioning Foucault fails to “sufficiently stress” the connection the between self‐

cultivation and the exercise of reason that was integral to these traditions. By contrast

with the Hellenistic traditions, Hadot maintains, Foucault’s own notion of the

cultivation of the self was “too purely aesthetic – that is to say, I fear, a new form of

dandyism, a late twentieth century version”, and for that reason could not

legitimately claim descent from ancient sources. In this respect, Hadot confirms one

of the central claims of this paper: that Foucault anachronistically attributes a late

twentieth‐century dandyism to the ancient practices of the self; see Pierre Hadot,

‘Reflections on the notion of the “cultivation of the self”’ in Michel Foucault,

Philosopher, 225‐232, 230.

60 Timothy O’Leary correctly observes that while in volumes 2 and 3 of the History of

Sexuality Foucault clearly distinguishes between the teloi of classical and late Stoic

ethics ‐ the former aiming at political power, and the latter at self‐composure and

self‐enjoyment ‐ in his interview he nevertheless insists on attributing a single, purely

aesthetic telos, the cultivation of beauty, to these two ethical traditions. O’Leary

claims that Foucault deliberately engaged in this mystification for the sake of a

contemporary project, viz., jolting his readers out of a habitual acceptance of a

particular form of universalist morality. See O’Leary, Foucault and the Art of Ethics, 7,

86, & 172.

61 CS, 68, emphasis added; see also, UP, 63, 70.

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