Continuation..
Ure: Senecan Moods
the other, because to be master of oneself meant that you were able to
rule others. So the mastery of oneself was directly related to a
dissymmetrical relation to others … Later on … mastery of oneself is
something which is not primarily related to power over others: you have to
be master of yourself not only in order to rule others … but you have to
be master of yourself because you are a rational being. And in this mastery of
ourself, you are related to other people, who are masters of themselves. And
before.62
akes the figure of Socrates in the Apology
as the seminal source of the Greco‐Roman ethic of caring for oneself.
Unfort ation
of the
Socrates was defending himself with all his might against this
arrogant neglect of the human for the benefit of the human race, and
y
this new kind of relation to the other is much less non‐reciprocal than
Stoicism and Nietzsche: The Golden Age of Self-Cultivation
A brief examination of Foucault’s schematic depiction of the golden age of
Stoic self‐cultivation suggests that it is precisely this kind of self‐cultivation
which provides the groundwork for Nietzsche’s conception of the art of
living.63 Foucault follows in Nietzsche’s footsteps by identifying the origin of
the tradition of caring for oneself, the organising principle of the classical art
of existence, in the early Socratic dialogues. It is the neglect of this Socratic
tradition, Nietzsche asserts, that “transforms the earth for so many into a ‘vale
of tears’”.64 Like Foucault, Nietzsche t
unately, Nietzsche laments, the Christian orientation to the “salv
soul” has buried this tradition:
Priests and teachers, and the sublime lust for power of idealists of
every description … hammer into childrenthat what matters is … the
salvation of the soul, the service of the state, the advancement of
science, or the accumulation of reputation and possessions, all as a
means of doing service to mankind as a whole; while the
requirements of the individual, his great and small needs within the
twenty‐four hours of the day, are to be regarded as something
contemptible or a matter of indifference. Already in ancient Greece
62 GE, 357‐358, emphasis added. Gretchen Reydams‐Schils amplifies and clarifies this
quick gloss on the connection the Stoics drew between the care of the self and
relationality; see Gretchen Reydam‐Schils, The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and
Affection (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2006), Ch. 2.
63 Jim Urpeth makes a similar claim about the “fundamental, though largely implicit
contribution” Foucault’s history of the ancient care of the self makes to arriving at a
clear understanding of Nietzsche’s idea of askēsis. Urpeth, however, conceives
Nietzsche’s ‘affirmative ascesis’ as in some sense ‘Dionysian’ rather than Stoic. See
Jim Urpeth, ‘Noble Ascesis: Between Nietzsche and Foucault’, New Nietzsche Studies,
vol. 2, no. 3‐4 (summer 1998), 65‐91, p. 72.
64 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1991), §6 (Hereafter WS).
35
foucault studies, No 4, pp. 19-52
loved to indicate the true compass and content of all reflection and
care with an expression of Homer’s: it comprises, he said, nothing
other than ‘that which I encounter of good and ill in my own house’.65
a
assumed its conception of the self, its ethics and its
practic
According to Foucault, this Socratic ethic of caring for the self reaches
its summit in Roman Stoicism. In the Hellenistic and imperial periods, he
observes, the Socratic notion of ‘taking care of oneself’ became a common
philosophical theme. The Roman Stoics, in particular, conceived the care of
the self as an end in itself and transformed it into a way of living that
extended cross thewhole of the individual’s life.66 In Seneca and Marcus
Aurelius, Foucault contends, the thematic of caring for oneself, their
“meticulous attention to the details of daily life, with the movements of the
spirit, with self‐analysis”, became the centre of philosophical life and
“gradually acquired the dimensions of a veritable ‘cultivation of the self’”.67
Indeed, they defined human existence as a permanent exercise of the self on
itself. As the imperative to care for oneself assumed centre stage in Roman
philosophic culture it organised itself around a conception of the self as a
reflexive exercise, an exercise of the self on itself mediated through certain
forms of self‐examination and ascetic practices. A brief analysis of Stoicism’s
care for the self, as Foucault presents it, suggests that in his middle works
Nietzsche self‐consciously
es, as his own.68
Like Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Nietzsche extracts the
principle of caring for oneself as the key Socratic legacy, and he identifies the
chief cause of all psychical frailties as the failure to attend to this principle and
undertake the continuous, careful observation of the most minute and closest
details of one’s mode of life.69 In common with the Stoics, Nietzsche
conceptualises self‐observation as labour of the self on itself. The Greek term
epimeleia, as Foucault points out, designates not a preoccupation with oneself,
or an ‘idle’ gazing at oneself, but a whole set of occupations, a work of the self
on itself.70 Epimeleia heautou, Foucault observes, describes the activities of the
65 WS §6; see Plato, Apology 29e, Homer, Odyssey, Bk. IV, l. 392; Foucault cites this
passage from the Apology as the fountainhead of the ethics of the care of the self in
CS, 44 and TS, 20.
66 See HS, Lecture 5.
67 TS, 28, CS, 44
68 Günter Gödde demonstrates that the Hellenistic therapeia are the starting point for
Nietzsche’s (and Freud’s) notion of the work of the self; see Günter Gödde, ‘Die
Antike Therapeutik als Gemeinsamer Bezugpunkt für Nietzsche und Freud’, Nietzsche‐
Studien, Bd, 32 (2003), 206‐225
69 WS §6; see also Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality,
trans. R. J. Hollindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985),§462 (Hereafter
D).
70 CS, 50
36
Ure: Senecan Moods
master of the household, the work of agricultural management, and a doctor’s
treatment of patients. Nietzsche’s middle works are studded with examples of
these forms of labour being used as metaphors for the work of the self on
itself.
s cultivation of itself, and the flourishing garden as
the image of its purpose:
is not the gardener but only
the soil of the plants that grow in him! 73
a Stoic and the work he undertakes on
himself as a Stoic spiritual exercise:
swamp grounds usually cause to flourish
like poisonous fungi.75
71
In criticising those who take pity on others, for example, he alleges
that their actions and prescriptions prevent the pitied from properly
managing their own domestic economy.72 In other places, he takes gardening
as the metaphor of the self’
Gardener and garden. – Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude,
out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up like fungus:
one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze at us,
morose and grey. Woe to the thinker who
In the 1886 preface to the second volume of Human, All Too Human, he recasts
the entire enterprise as a work he undertook on himself in order to weed out
Schopenhauer’s pessimistic judgements from his own soul. Here he brings
together Stoic notions of the exercise of the self, its insistence on constant
inward vigilance, with the Stoic emphasis on self‐composure and equanimity
in the face of loss and sorrow, and its resolute defence of life against the
judgements of melancholia. Nietzsche confronts what we might describe as
Schopenhauer’s revolt against mourning ‐ or against the possibility of coming
to terms with loss ‐ with the Stoic endurance of separation and solitude.74 In
this context, he portrays himself as
[In Human, All Too Human, volume 2, and The Wanderer and his
Shadow] there is a determination to preserve an equilibrium and
composure in the face of life and even a sense of gratitude towards it,
here there rules a vigorous, proud, constantly watchful and sensitive
will that has set itself the task of defending life against pain and of
striking down all those inferences that pain, disappointment, ill‐
humour, solitude and other
71 GE, 49‐50. Graham Parkes gives a brilliant and exhaustive treatment of Nietzsche’s
metaphors of the soul; see Graham Parkes, Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s
Psychology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994).
72 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage,
1974), §338 (Hereafter GS).
73 D §382; see also D §560.
74 For Schopenhauer’s Augustinian inspired critique of Stoic eudaimonism see The
World as Will and Representation, volumes 1 & 2 (New York: Dover Publications, 1969),
vol. 1, §16, esp., 86‐91 and vol. 2, Ch. XVI.
75 HAH 2, Preface, §5
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foucault studies, No 4, pp. 19-52
But Nietzsche, again following the Stoics, in whom this tendency
reaches its zenith, reserves a privileged place for medical metaphors in his
articulation of the art of living. The Hellenistic schools, and most
comprehensively Roman Stoics, correlate the care of the self with medical
thought and practice. Indeed, as Nussbaum observes, this correlation had
become so pervasive in Stoic thought that Cicero felt the need to complain of
their “excessive attention” to such analogies.76 Cicero succinctly expresses the
medical analogy on which Hellenistic philosophy pivots:
There is I assure you, a medical art for the soul. It is philosophy,
whose aid need not be sought, as in bodily diseases, from outside
ourselves. We must endeavour with all of our resources and all our
strength to become capable of doctoring ourselves.77
Like his Hellenistic predecessors, Nietzsche obsessively returns to the idea
that philosophy is a therapeutic art that heals the sufferings and diseases of
the soul.78 Unsurprisingly, therefore, he contests or challenges other
philosophic perspectives by accusing them of quack‐doctoring or medical
negligence.79 Nietzsche adopts the collectively shared view of the Cynics,
Epicureans and Stoics that such maladies are often perpetuated and
reinforced by erroneous beliefs and value judgements that translate into
disorders or affects that carry the soul away from itself. Nietzsche interprets
his own philosophy as so many signs and symptoms in his soul’s cycle of
illness, convalescence and health. He frames his writings in much the same
way as Seneca, who reports to Lucilius that he is recording the stages in his
self‐treatment for those who “are recovering from a prolonged spiritual
sickness” and on “behalf of later generations”:80
I am writing down a few things that may be of use to them; I am
committing to writing some helpful recommendations, which might
be compared to formulae of successful medications, the effectiveness of
which I have experienced in the case of my own sores, which may not have
been completely cured but have at least ceased to spread.81
76 Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, quoted in Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, 316.
77 Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, quoted in Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, 316.
78 Nietzsche mines this seam of Hellenistic thought in countless places and contexts; for
just a few examples see, D §52, §449, §534 and the 1886 Prefaces to HAH, vols. 1 & 2,
and GS.
79 WS §83
80 Lucius Annaeus Seneca L.VIII.2 in Letters from a Stoic, trans. Robin Campbell
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). All subsequent references to Seneca’s Letters are
taken from this translation except where noted.
81 L.VIII, emphasis added.
38
Ure: Senecan Moods
In recounting his own middle works, Nietzsche adopts Seneca’s rhetorical
pose, describing them as “the history of an illness and recovery”, “a spiritual
cure” and “self‐treatment” which teach “precepts of health that may be
recommended to the more spiritual natures of the generation just coming up
as a disciplina voluntatis”.82 Nietzsche, like Seneca, recommends these precepts,
and he also counsels that these spiritual natures “in whom all that exists
today of sickness, poison and danger comes together” become doctors to their
own soul. Permanent medical care, as Foucault relates, is one of the central
features that the Stoics introduced into the practice of self‐cultivation. In the
imperial age, he explains, paideia increasingly took on a medical coloration
that was absent in Platonic pedagogy.83 “One must” according to the Stoics
“become the doctor of oneself”.84
In the 1886 preface, in what is indisputably a homage to Stoic and
Cynic practices of the self, Nietzsche describes how he forged his philosophy
as an attempt to become the doctor of his own soul. In a passage overloaded
with allusions to the figure of Diogenes and to the Stoic soul‐doctors,
Nietzsche reports that it was their disciplines that enabled him to overcome
that pessimistic malaise, whose main symptom he identifies as an oscillation
between extreme denial and manic affirmation. It is worth quoting this
passage at length in order to gauge the full extent to which Nietzsche
identifies his philosophy with Cynicism and Stoicism from this passage:
Just as a physician places his patient in a wholly strange environment
so that he may be removed from his entire ‘hitherto’, from his cares,
his friends, letters, duties, stupidities and torments of memory and learn
to reach out with new hands and senses to new nourishment, a new
sun, a new future, so I as physician and patient in one compelled myself to
an opposite and unexplored clime of the soul, and especially a curative
journey into strange parts, into strangeness itself, to an inquisitiveness
regarding every kind of strange thing … A protracted wandering
around, seeking, changing followed from this, a repugnance towards
all staying still, toward every blunt affirmation and denial; likewise a
dietetic and discipline designed to make it easy as possible for a spirit
to run long distances, to fly to great heights, above all again and again
to fly away. A minimum of life, in fact, an unchaining from all coarser
desires, an independence in the midst of all kinds of unfavourable
outward circumstances together with pride in being able to live
surrounded by these unfavourable circumstances; a certain amount of
cynicism, perhaps, a certain amount of ‘barrel’ but just as surely a
great deal of capricious happiness, capricious cheerfulness, a great
deal of stillness, light, subtler folly, concealed enthusiasm – all this
82 HAH 2 Preface, §2, §5
83 CS, 55
84 TS, 31
39
foucault studies, No 4, pp. 19-52
finally resulted in a great spiritual strengthening, an increasing joy
and abundance of health. Life itself rewards us for our tough will to
live, for the long war that I then waged with myself against the
pessimism of weariness with life, even for every attentive glance our
gratitude accords to even the smallest, tenderest, most fleeting gift life
gives us.85
Nietzsche spells out here his debt to the philosophic therapy of Cynicism and
Stoicism without any reservations, a debt so great that a complete
interpretation of this passage would entail an exposition of almost every
significant aspect of these two philosophical schools. For the moment, we
need only note that Nietzsche explicitly affirms the Stoic medical analogy and
its notion that philosophic practice should act as a tonic to the soul, a means
of overcoming the torments of memory and the violent oscillation between
melancholia and mania that disturbs the soul’s equanimity and composure.
The Stoics took the medical analogy with sufficient seriousness that
they could designate the procedures of the care of the self with a whole array
of medical metaphors. Foucault reports a series of medical metaphors that
they regularly employed: “put the scalpel to the wound; open an abscess,
amputate; evacuate the superfluities, give medications; prescribe bitter,
soothing or bracing potions”.86 Nietzsche borrows many of these metaphors
to describe his art of psychological examination and its objects, confirming his
commitment to reviving their therapeutic model of philosophy. In Human, All
Too Human, he proposes that we see his work as a “psychological dissection
table” and his analyses as the “knives and forceps” he uses to remove
diseased moral, religious, aesthetic, and social “sensations”; and he writes of
applying conceptual “icepacks” to reduce the fevers of the soul produced by
metaphysical and religious errors.87 This conception of philosophic
procedures and the ethics of the care of the self it carries with it pervades
Nietzsche’s thinking, down to the most minute details, which are easily lost in
the polemical storm that surrounds his work. We can see this, for example, in
the way Nietzsche urges a medical response to the treatment of human
suffering. Following the Stoics, Nietzsche believes individuals must cure
themselves of pity and self‐pity, otherwise they will be incapable of enabling
others to overcome their own sufferings. Nietzsche makes this case against
pity in the name of an alternative medico‐philosophic therapy. In doing so, he
85 HAH 2 Preface, §5, emphases added. Nietzsche also touches on Diogenes the Dog at
HAH §1, §34, §275. For a recent account of Nietzsche’s relation to the Cynic tradition
see Heinrich Nichues‐Pröbsting, ‘The Modern Reception of Cynicism’, in R. Bracht
Branham & Marie‐Coile Goulet‐Gaze (eds.), The Cynics (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996), 329‐365, 354ff.
86 CS, 55
87 HAH 1, §37, §38; D §53.
40
Ure: Senecan Moods
leans on the Stoic conception of the philosopher as physician who skilfully
employs various procedures in search of a cure:
… to serve mankind as a physician in any sense whatever one will have
to be very much on guard against pity – it will paralyse him at every
decisive moment and apply a ligature to his knowledge and his subtle
helpful hand.88
Finally, to complete this picture Nietzsche, along with the Stoics,
believes this medical practice of the self is best pursued through the
application of tests that function as diagnostic procedures for assessing the
health of the soul and, if applied frequently and rigorously, as partial cures or
tonics for the soul. The Stoics famously counsel the practice of praemeditatio as
a means of testing the extent to which the soul has risen above the tumult of
anger, vengeance and envy, and as a way of moving towards achieving the
goal of philosophical therapy.89 The practice aims to establish a rational soul
whose self‐composure is founded on a joy in itself that cannot be perturbed
by the sufferings and deprivations fortune ceaselessly inflicts on mortals.
Foucault correctly notes that the purpose of these testing procedures “is to
enable one to do without unnecessary things by establishing a supremacy
over oneself that does not depend on their presence or absence. The tests to
which one subjects oneself are not successive stages of privation. They are
ways of measuring and confirming the independence one is capable of with
regard to everything that is not indispensable and essential”.90 Seneca exhorts
Lucilius to ‘rehearse’ poverty, suffering and death not because he ought to
value renunciation or mortification for their own sake, but so that he can
maintain his equanimity in the face of all circumstances.91 Foucault correctly
observes that this relationship of the self to itself is antithetical to the Christian
hermeneutic of self‐decipherment and self‐renunciation.92 In Stoic self‐testing,
one does not seek to decipher a hidden truth of the self for the sake of self‐
renunciation. Rather, in the philosophic tradition dominated by Stoicism,
askēsis “means not renunciation but the progressive … mastery over oneself,
88 D §134; For the Stoic critique of pity, see Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On Mercy, esp. Ch. 6
in Minor Dialogues, trans. Aubrey Stewart (London: George Bell and Sons, 1902).
89 See for example Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Helvia, in Minor Dialogues, trans. Aubrey
Stewart (London: George Bell and Sons, 1902), 324‐325. Foucault treats the Stoic
practice of praemeditatio in HS, Lecture 23, 468‐473.
90 CS, 59. Foucault elaborates the Stoic notion of life as a test in HS, Lecture 22.
91 See L.XVIII, XXIV & XXVI where he counsels Lucilius to rehearse poverty and death
so that he can maintain his liberty and equanimity should he in fact lose his fortune
or suffer the threat of the Emperor’s sword.
92 Foucault develops this point in BHS.
41
foucault studies, No 4, pp. 19-52
obtained not through the renunciation of reality, but through the acquisition
and assimilation of truth”.93
Nietzsche explicitly recalls the Stoic tradition of self‐testing to explain
the philosophic therapy he undertook in the middle works. Like the Stoics, he
claims that if we wish to “return to health, we have no choice: we have to
burden ourselves more heavily than we have ever been burdened before
…”.94 He explains his own exploration of a resolutely post‐metaphysical
perspective as part of a campaign that “I conducted with myself as a patient”,
or as a form of “self‐testing” that all pessimists should use as a signpost to the
health of their soul.95 Nietzsche’s most famous test of the soul, the potentially
crushing burden of the eternal recurrence, the “greatest weight”, as he calls it,
is cut from the Stoic cloth: it is both diagnostic and curative.96 Bernd Magnus’s
groundbreaking study of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence
(unwittingly) discloses the close link between the goals of Stoic askēsis and
Nietzsche’s doctrine. He structures his entire account of Nietzsche’s
philosophy in terms of the Stoic medical analogy without, however,
acknowledging its Hellenistic and Stoic provenance.97 According to Magnus,
Nietzsche’s philosophy centres on the diagnosis of a particular disease,
‘kronophobia’, the identification of its various symptoms (Platonism,
Christianity, and romantic pessimism) and its treatment or therapy. He
conceives Nietzsche’s philosophy, in short, as a therapeutic treatment of the
‘kronophobic’ malaise. Platonism and Christianity and romantic pessimism,
each in their own way, express the kronophobe’s “need to arrest becoming,
the need to make transience abide. The flux cannot be endured without
transfiguration. Time, temporality must be overcome”.98 In this context,
Magnus claims that the “value of eternal recurrence … lies primarily in its
diagnostic thrust”; that is to say, he sees it as a test that the self applies to itself
to determine the extent to which it suffers from the disease of kronophobia.99
Indeed, he sees the idea of eternal recurrence as a diagnostic tool which
enables us to become aware of suffering from a disease, a morbid suffering
that we would otherwise fail to detect in ourselves.
For Nietzsche the testing of the self that the eternal recurrence enacts
shares a goal in common with the ethical practices of his Hellenistic and Stoic
predecessors. According to Foucault, they aim at a “conversion to the self”
93 TS, 35. Foucault spells out the difference aims of Stoic and Christian askēsis in HS,
Lecture 16, esp. 321‐327
94 HAH 2 Preface, §5
95 HAH 2 Preface, §5
96 GS §341
97 Bernd Magnus, Nietzsche’s Existential Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1978), p. 7, 42‐43.
98 Magnus, Nietzsche’s Existential Imperative, 194
99 Magnus, Nietzsche’s Existential Imperative, 156.
42
Ure: Senecan Moods
that expresses itself in a certain relationship or disposition of the self to
itself.100 This conversion succeeds where the self takes joy in itself in the same
way that one takes pleasure in a friend. “What progress have I made?” Seneca
writes to Lucilius “I am beginning to be my own friend”.101 “Such a person”
he adds “will never be alone, and you may be sure he is a friend of all [amicum
omnibus]”.102 The Hellenistic thinkers believe that the labour of establishing
this friendship between the self and itself enables individuals to sustain
themselves without vengefulness, and take joy in their existence regardless of
the blessings or curses of fortune. Hellenistic ethics is not about fortifying
oneself against loss, which, if the Stoics are right, is an impossible, self‐
defeating and anxiety‐inducing project, but about fortifying oneself against a
vengeful response to loss. “The geometrician teaches me how to keep my
boundaries intact,” Seneca quips, “but what I want to learn is how to lose the
whole lot cheerfully”.103
In formulating the doctrine of eternal recurrence, Nietzsche echoes the
Stoic notion that the aim of self‐testing is to transform one’s relationship to
oneself, or to become, as Seneca puts it, one’s own friend: “(H)ow well disposed
to yourself and to life”, Nietzsche remarks in the concluding line of his
famously dramatic invocation of recurrence, “to crave nothing more fervently
than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal”.104 It is a test, in other words,
that is designed to measure and move one towards acquiring the virtue of
being well disposed or friendly towards oneself. Here the point of Foucault’s
distinction between morality and ethics, and its application to the Stoics and
Nietzsche becomes apparent: their ethics of the care of the self principally
concerns the manner in which agents or subjects relate to, and transform
themselves in the process of becoming agents or subjects of action, rather than
with establishing or adjudicating normative codes. How the self relates to
itself, especially to “the greatest weight” it is burdened with, its memories and
its losses, lies at the heart of Nietzsche’s and Stoicism’s therapeia.105 Like the
100 CS, 64
101 L.VI
102 L.VI, emphasis added.
103 L.LXXXVIII.11 in C. D. N. Costa’s translation, Seneca: 17 Letters, (Warminster: Aris
and Phillips, 1988); Seneca here takes the loss of property as an allegory for all the
losses we must endure, including mortality. His point then is that Stoics must learn
how to lose their property, and ultimately their ownmost property, cheerfully; it is
thus the difficult art of learning how to lose without bitterness or vengefulness that is
central to the Stoic’s practices.
104 GS §341, emphasis added.
105 Commentators often neglect the Stoics’ account of the therapeutic function of
memory in the composition of the soul. As Gretchen Reydam‐Schils observes,
“(b)ecause memory is ranked among the indifferents, and time is one of the
incorporeals in the Stoic system, the importance of these two notions has been
overlooked in assessments of the Stoic idea of selfhood. But they are, in fact,
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foucault studies, No 4, pp. 19-52
Stoics, then, Nietzsche’s conception of the self’s work on itself is more
properly speaking therapeutic than ‘aesthetic’. In elaborating the nature and
purpose of the specifically ‘artistic’ elements of the self’s work on itself
Nietzsche makes it clear that they are subordinate parts of a therapeutic task
or work (Aufgabe) that treats outbreaks of psychical fears and torments:
Against the art of works of art. – Art is above and before all supposed
to beautify life, thus make ourselves endurable, if possible pleasing to
others: with this task in view it restrains us and keeps us within
bounds, creates social forms … Then art is supposed to conceal or
reinterpret everything ugly, those painful, dreadful, disgusting things
which all efforts notwithstanding, in accord with the origin of human
nature again and again insist on breaking forth: it is supposed to do
so especially in regard to passions and psychical fears and torments ...
After this great, indeed immense task of art, what is usually termed
art, that of the work of art, is merely an appendage.106
It is not surprising therefore that when Foucault turns to elaborating a new
perspective on Hellenistic philosophy in his 1981‐1982 lectures, he very briefly
identifies Nietzsche’s philosophy as one of several nineteenth‐century
German attempts at reconstituting the Hellenistic and Roman arts of living.107
Indeed, it seems that Foucault undertook his journey back to the golden age
of self‐cultivation for the sake of understanding how Nietzsche and other
representatives of modern German philosophy sought to resurrect the
Hellenistic conception of philosophy as a way of life, to borrow Pierre Hadot’s
term.108 Foucault claims that this strand of German philosophy attempted to
recover the Hellenistic model by once again connecting the “activity of
knowing” with “the requirements of spirituality”.109 Following Hadot,
Foucault draws a sharp divide between this Hellenistic therapeutic‐practical
conception of philosophy, on the one side, and the strictly cognitive
understanding of philosophy that has dominated the discipline since
Descartes, on the other.110 Hadot and Foucault share the view that Hellenistic
revealing and crucial to the question”. See Reydam‐Schils, The Roman Stoics, 29, & 29‐
34.
106 HAH 2, §174, emphasis added.
107 HS, 28 & 251.
108 See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to
Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), esp. Ch. 11.
109 HS, 28
110 HS, 14‐16. Foucault actually refers to the ‘Cartesian moment’ rather than Descartes.
Foucault uses this phrase merely as a convenient signpost for a broad shift in the
conception of philosophy rather than as a comment upon Descartes’ philosophy. His
caution here relates to the fact that even in Descartes’ philosophy, as Hadot observes,
elements of the ancient spiritual exercises such as meditatio survive; see Hadot,
Philosophy as a Way of Life, 271
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Ure: Senecan Moods
and Roman philosophy differs dramatically from post‐Cartesian philosophy
insofar as it pivots on the assumption that the activity of philosophic knowing
is always tied “to a transformation of the subject’s being”.111 If they are
correct, the acrimonious contemporary conflict between ‘Continental
philosophy’ and analytic philosophy revolves around the issue of whether the
practice of philosophy can and ought to transform the whole of the
individual’s way of being, or, in Hadot’s words, whether wisdom should not
merely cause us to know, but to make us ‘be’ in a different way.112
As we have seen, Foucault is undoubtedly correct to identify Nietzsche as a
key figure in the German philosophic movement that sought to reanimate the
spiritual‐cum‐therapeutic ambitions of Hellenistic philosophy, though he errs
slightly in claiming that Nietzsche and his fellow travellers do so only
“implicitly”.113 It is clear that in his middle works Nietzsche explicitly
assumes the stance of a philosophical therapist on the model of the Hellenistic
and Roman examples. Indeed, as early as his inaugural Basel lecture (1869),
Nietzsche memorably invokes Seneca’s lament that the rise of sophistic
teaching had transformed philosophy, the study of wisdom, into philology,
the study of mere words.114 In what he calls a “confession of faith”, Nietzsche
declares his intention of performing the reverse operation: turning philology
into philosophy; that is to say, of transforming a discipline that teaches us
how to commentate into one that teaches us how to live.115 Nietzsche self‐
consciously models his philosophic enterprise on the Senecan/Stoic notion of
philosophy as a mode of knowing that transforms who one is.
In his 1981‐1982 lectures Foucault follows Nietzsche’s lead: his positivistic
account of the shifts and transformations in the history of the ancient care of
the self is fuelled by a similar enchantment with the prospect of rekindling a
mode of knowing that transfigures or liberates the self. Like Nietzsche,
Foucault seems to lament the fact that philosophy after Descartes came to be
conceived as a purely cognitive activity that ought to be purged of the
misguided Hellenistic notion that the acquisition of truth must transform
one’s being. In one of the rare moment of pathos in these lectures, Foucault
conjures up the lonely figure of Faust lamenting that all his scholarly
lucubrations, “philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine and theology” have
111 HS, 14‐16.
112 Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 265. Simon Critchley takes up Hadot’s distinction in
his attempt to mediate the debate between analytic and ‘Continental’ philosophy; see,
Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) , Ch.
1.
113 HS, 28
114 LCVIII. 23 “Itaque quae philosophia fuit facta philologia est”.
115 “Philosophia facta est quae philologia fuit”. The passage is from Nietzsche’s inaugural
Basel lecture (May 1869), later privately published as ‘Homer and Classical
Philology’; quoted in James I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000), 14 & 35.
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foucault studies, No 4, pp. 19-52
yielded nothing “by way of his own transfiguration”.116 Foucault himself
clearly sympathises with this Faustian nostalgia for the ancient figure of
knowledge as a source of spiritual transfiguration.117
At the same time, however, he remains sceptical about the possibility of any
attempt to reconstitute an ethics of the self. Though he declares that
establishing a contemporary care of the self is “an urgent, fundamental and
politically indispensable task”, Foucault suspects that not only are all
nineteenth‐century German attempts like Nietzsche’s “blocked and ossified”,
but that despite our recent efforts in this direction we may well simply find it
“impossible to constitute an ethics of the self”.118 Regrettably, Foucault never
had the opportunity to explore the different ways German philosophy sought
to renovate and recover the ancient arts of living and their spiritual
modalisation of knowledge. We will never know, therefore, the exact reasons
for his scepticism about both Nietzsche’s and his own efforts to restore
philosophy as a spiritual and therapeutic adventure. It seems reasonable to
suppose, however, one of the central difficulties that may have prompted this
note of doubt is the collapse of the cosmological and mythical beliefs that
were essential to the conceptual structure and psychological efficacy of the
Hellenistic therapeia. It is a problem Nietzsche also faced insofar as he found it
impossible to frame his key ‘spiritual exercise’, the thought of eternal
recurrence, without recourse to Stoicism’s cyclical cosmological doctrine.119
We might surmise that Foucault saw how problematic it is to think that
Stoicism’s spiritual exercises are philosophically sustainable or
psychologically plausible in the absence of the Stoics’ foundational belief in a
providential or divine logos.120
Foucault’s account of the Hellenistic and Roman therapeia remains then a
prolegomenon to a study of their modern renovations that he never had the
116 HS, 310.
117 In UP Foucault puts the point in the form of a rhetorical question: “After all, what
would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted in a certain amount of
knowledgeableness and not in one way or another … in the knower’s straying afield of
himself?” The answer obviously is that pursuing knowledge would have very little
value unless it put at stake the very being of the knower. The question Foucault does
not raise here, and which I discuss below, is whether his way of straying afield of
himself is compatible with Stoicism’s fundamental normative assumptions; see UP, 8
(emphases added).
118 HS, 252, 251.
119 The exact nature of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence remains a matter of
considerable dispute. It is still a matter of debate whether Nietzsche considered it a
cosmological doctrine or an existential test that one could undertake without
committing oneself to belief in the literal eternal return of all things. For the latest
installment in this debate see Lawrence J. Hatab, Nietzsche’s Life Sentence: Coming to
Terms with Eternal Recurrence (New York: Routledge, 2005).
120 Pierre Hadot attempts to address this problem in Philosophy as a Way of Life, 273, 282‐
284.
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Ure: Senecan Moods
opportunity to undertake. As we have seen, in the 1981‐1982 lectures he goes
a long way to establishing that their fundamental point of convergence
between the ancient and modern ethics of the self is the link they establish
between knowledge and self‐transformation. However, these lectures only
give us a tantalising intimation of the manner in which Nietzsche and others
sought to rework the Hellenistic therapeia and to challenge the Cartesian
separation of knowledge and spirituality, truth and subjectivity. It is perhaps
because Foucault only had the opportunity to gloss these issues that he never
fully comes to grips with the possibility that some of the currents of thought
he considers reinventions of the ancient care of the self, most notably
Baudelaire’s aestheticism, seem to radically diverge from the normative
assumptions of the Hellenistic and Stoic traditions. Indeed, from the Stoic and
Nietzschean perspective (or at least the Nietzsche of the middle works), the
limitless, perpetual self‐transformation that Foucault champions must surely
count as one of the pathologies that the care of the self is designed to cure,
viz., the restlessness that Stoics refer to as ‘stultitia’, and which they argue
derives from a lack of self‐sufficiency.
The Limits of Foucault’s Limit-Attitude
Foucault’s re‐examination of the Stoic practices of the self, then, makes it
possible to see one of the key philosophical sources of Nietzsche’s ethics of
subjectivity. However, Foucault’s own approach to self‐fashioning as the
continuous estrangement of the self from itself, as an askēsis aimed at nothing
other than getting “free of oneself” or “straying afield of (one)self”, also strays
far from the Stoics’ and Nietzsche’s therapeia.121 Foucault’s aesthetic modernist
conception of self‐fashioning as a release from all pre‐given limits is too often
and too easily identified as a continuation of Nietzsche’s project:
The work of Foucault… explicitly adopted Nietzsche’s advocacy of
aesthetic fashioning as an ideal. Rather than being true to the alleged
‘authentic’ self advocated by existentialists like Sartre, he insists, “we
have to create ourselves as a work of art”. The result might well
resemble the elite and narcissistic world of the nineteenth century
Dandy, who deliberately rejected the telos of a natural self in favour of
a life of contrived artifice, and did so with minimal regard for
others.122
121 UP, 8, see, 8‐9. For an excellent treatment of Foucault’s notion of ‘limit experiences’ as
a transgression of the limits of coherent subjectivity see Martin Jay, Songs of
Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme
(Berkeley:University of California Press, 2005), 390‐400.
122 Martin Jay, ‘The Morals Of Genealogy: Or is there a Post‐Structuralist Ethics?’ The
Cambridge Review (June 1989), 73, emphasis added.
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foucault studies, No 4, pp. 19-52
Yet, as we have seen, Nietzsche’s primary debt lies with Hellenistic and Stoic
philosophical therapy, not Baudelaire’s aesthetic modernism. By anchoring
Nietzsche in this tradition it becomes apparent that his conception of the self
and self‐fashioning must in fact be distinguished from Foucault’s
Baudelairean fantasy of ‘unrestricted’, open‐ended self‐invention. The
differences can be seen by comparing this tradition with Foucault’s
conceptualisation of aesthetic self‐fashioning:
What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become
something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or
to life … But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the
lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life? … From the idea that the
self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we
have to create ourselves as a work of art. 123
The analogy Foucault draws here between life and the raw materials of
artistic poiesis immediately indicates the gulf separating him from the
conceptual framework of Stoic and Nietzschean therapy. Foucault appears to
be advocating “an arbitrary stylisation of life”, as one commentator expresses
it, a stylisation that eschews the possibility that the material it shapes has an
intrinsic telos and that is independent of all external or objective norms.124 He
claims that the justification for this notion of aesthetic fashioning lies in the
fact that the self is “not given to us”. In other words, Foucault challenges the
notion that liberation is the discovery and expression of an authentic self that
pre‐exists the exercise of liberty.125 If, however, as Taylor points out, the self is
not given to us in this sense, it is not clear what justifies Foucault’s normative
judgement that we have to (or “must” as he says elsewhere) create ourselves as
a work of art.126
123 GE, 350‐51, emphasis added.
124 See Dews, ‘The Return of the Subject in Foucault’, 40.
125 Foucault warns that there is a danger that liberation “will refer back to the idea that
there does exist a nature or a human foundation which, as a result of a certain
number of historical, social or economic processes, found itself concealed, alienated,
imprisoned in and by some repressive mechanism. In this hypothesis it would suffice
to unloosen these repressive blocks so that man can be reconciled with himself, once
again find his nature or renew contact with his roots and restore a full a positive
relationship with himself”; ECS 113.
126 “If I was interested in Antiquity it was because, for a whole series of reasons, the idea
of morality as disobedience to a code of rules is now disappearing, has already
disappeared. And to this absence of morality corresponds, must correspond, a search
for an aesthetics of existence”; AE, p. 311, emphasis added; and Charles Taylor,
‘Foucault on Freedom and Truth’ in D. C. Hoy (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader,
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 69‐102. O’Leary claims that we should read
Foucault’s imperative as a historical, rather than a moral necessity. However, if we
recall that both philosophically and methodologically Foucault is deeply committed
to an anti‐teleological perspective, it seems highly implausible to believe that he
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More importantly, while Nietzsche might also eschew the notion that
the self is given to us in the sense of an ‘authentic’ or natural self, his
philosophical therapy implies that the self is given to us in another sense: the
‘self’ that is already there consists of the powerful affects and moods that
derive from the loss of our phantasy of majestic plenitude. Nietzsche does not
therefore conceptualise the material of self‐fashioning as analogous to the
indifferent, indeterminate material of artistic poiesis, as Foucault sometimes
does; rather, he describes this material as the “passions and psychical fears
and torments” which break forth from human nature.127 Nietzschean self‐
cultivation is not the all‐too‐easy and purely cognitive acknowledgement of
the self’s historical ‘contingency’. What the self confronts in the “immense
task of art”, Nietzsche suggests, is not an abstract, contingent ‘otherness’, but
its own powerful desire for narcissistic plenitude and the history of its
attempts to console itself for the loss of this ideal state. For Nietzsche, then,
self‐fashioning is the working‐through of those affects or passions that derive
from the human subject’s loss of its narcissistic majesty and which, so he
claims, engender an array of pathological modes of interaction through which
it consoles itself for this loss:
The oldest means of solace.– First stage: man sees in every feeling of
indisposition or misfortune something for which he has to make
someone else suffer – in doing so he becomes conscious of the power
he still possesses and this consoles him.128
Foucault’s purely aesthetic and formalistic conception of self‐fashioning
empties the Nietzschean and Hellenistic tradition of this psychological
significance.129 Rather than being oriented toward the ‘aesthetic’ achievement
would resort to the notion of historical necessity to support his normative
judgements or intuitions. We might be better served seeing Foucault’s imperative as
illustrating Nietzsche’s quip: “There is a point in every philosophy when the
philosopher’s ‘conviction’ appears on the stage ‐ or to use the language of an ancient
Mystery: Adventavit asinus/Pulcher et fortissimos (The ass arrived, beautiful and most
brave)”; see O’Leary, Foucault and the Art of Ethics, 7 and BGE, 8.
127 HAH 2, §174. There is significant debate about how Foucault might have understood
basic material from which a subject is formed; see, for example, O’Leary, Foucault and
the Art of Ethics.; Chris Falzon, ‘Foucault’s Human Being’, Thesis Eleven, no. 34, (1993),
1‐16; Paul Patton, ‘Taylor and Foucault on Power and Freedom’, Political Studies, vol.
XXXVII, no. 2 (June 1989); and Paul Patton, ‘Foucault’s Subject of Power’, Political
Theory Newsletter, vol. 6, no. 1 (May 1994), 60‐71.
128 D §15
129 Joel Whitebook brilliantly analyses Foucault’s theoretical and personal resistance to
psychoanalytic theories, and cogently argues that many of the philosophical and
ethical problems of Foucault’s notion of self‐fashioning result from this resistance; see
Joel Whitebook, ‘Freud, Foucault and the Dialogue With Unreason’, Philosophy and
Social Criticism, vol. 25, no. 6 (1999), 29‐66 and ‘Against Interiority: Foucault’s
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foucault studies, No 4, pp. 19-52
of an original ‘personal’ style, Nietzschean and Stoic philosophic therapy
attempts to overcome the social and psychological pathologies that derive
from the loss of narcissistic wholeness. In both cases, the necessity of self‐
cultivation is established in the face of the pathologies generated by the
narcissistic origins of subjectivity.130
What the Stoics and Nietzsche confront is the pathos or suffering that
arise from the self’s discovery of its powerlessness and the phantasies through
which it allays this suffering, the earliest primitive forms of which Nietzsche
nominates as compensatory vengeance and the exchange logic of guilt and
atonement.131 The pathologies that Stoicism attempts to cure, as Foucault’s
account already implies, derive from what we might call the narcissistic
problem of separation and individuation. Stoic therapy focuses on how the
self can negotiate the tension between dependence and independence, or,
“presence” and “absence” – to use the terms Foucault finds himself compelled
to adopt in describing this therapy.132 Recast in these terms, Stoicism
investigates how the self can establish supremacy over itself, or perhaps more
accurately, joy in itself. Through Stoic therapy the self seeks to constitute itself
so that it can experience the uncontrollability and potential absence of
cherished objects as something other than its own annihilation.
In contrast with Foucault, Nietzsche and the Stoics frame their
accounts of the self in terms of the problem of the loss of majestic plenitude.
They identify the pathologies of the self as borne of the loss of this phantasy
of plenitude, which, according to Nietzsche and Freud, the self first
experiences in its inability to control objects and ensure their eternal presence.
Nietzsche and the Stoics critically examine the array of consolations which
reproduce, displace and exacerbate, rather than temper the problem of
narcissistic loss. Unlike Foucault, then, Nietzsche draws on the Stoic and
Hellenistic schools not as a remnant of a purely aesthetic program of self‐
fashioning, but as a philosophy that identifies the narcissistic foundations of
subjectivity and which elaborates a therapy, a work of the self on itself,
designed to address these narcissistic excesses and pathologies. In the middle
period, Nietzsche discovers in the Hellenistic and Stoic arts of the self models
Struggle with Psychoanalysis’ in Gary Gutting (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Foucault
(New York, Cambridge University Press: 2005), 312‐349.
130 I have tried to reframe Nietzsche’s ethics of self‐cultivation as a treatment of
narcissistic disorders in ‘Stoic Comedians: Nietzsche and Freud on the Art of
Arranging One’s Humours’, Nietzsche‐Studien, no. 34 (2005), 186‐216. Martha C.
Nussbaum attempts to illuminate and modify the Stoic’s theory of the emotions with
the aid of Freud’s theory of narcissism in Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the
Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Ch. 4.
131 D §15
132 CS, 59 (quoted above)
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Ure: Senecan Moods
for the work of memory and mourning which is integral to the analysis and
cure of the self.
In his failure to take seriously the ethical implications of the Stoic and
Nietzschean critique of the emotions, Foucault not only fails to recognise, or
at least fully acknowledge and define, the extent to which his own aesthetics
of self‐transformation is something quite different from the Stoic and
Nietzschean therapeutic work on the self, he leaves himself without the
conceptual resources for understanding the maladies that these therapeia seek
to treat. Indeed, by presupposing rather than critically probing the feeling of
powerlessness and restlessness that fuels the transgressive drive to flee from
oneself or tear oneself from oneself, Foucault transforms what the Stoics and
Nietzsche conceive of as a compulsive malady, explicable in terms of
narcissistic wounding, into a virtue.133
Despite Foucault’s backward glances to the Stoics’ and Nietzsche’s
philosophical therapy, his own model of the work of the self is in fact one of
the pathologies for which they seek a diagnosis and cure. For Stoic therapy
aims at establishing a sovereignty over oneself that abolishes all striving to
become other to oneself, and it achieves this composure through weeding out
the emotional attachments or investments that hold us in bondage to chance
events. If we fail to achieve this sovereignty, this state of self‐completion, the
Stoics argue, we must suffer from Stultitia, a kind of restlessness or
irresolution that compels the stultus to “constantly chang(e) his way of life”.134
Ironically, Foucault’s analysis of the Stoic goal of self‐completion and self‐
sufficiency reveals exactly how his own version of askēsis, which makes a
virtue of constantly seeking to become other to oneself, is at odds with
Stoicism’s fundamental normative and therapeutic orientation.
From the Stoic perspective, Foucault’s askēsis of constantly losing
oneself is symptomatic of a failure to care for oneself. Foucault himself
recognises that the Roman care of the self was “not a way of marking an
essential caesura in the subject”.135 As he observes, the Stoics deployed a
series of terms to refer to a break between the self and everything else, but
these terms did not refer to a “break of the self with the self”.136 Foucault’s
own notion of askēsis, in other words, seems to take up the Hellenistic and
Stoic therapeutic‐practical conception of philosophy, but to sever it from its
central normative ideal of self‐sufficiency and the analysis and critique of the
emotional agitations or pathologies on which this ideal is premised. In the
Stoic scheme Foucault’s celebration of the limit experiences that create radical
133 Paul Patton argues that Foucault must presuppose “something like a feeling of
powerlessness” in order to account for the desire to constantly transform oneself and
enhance one’s feeling of power. See Patton, ‘Foucault’s Subject of Power’, 71
134 HS, 132
135 HS, 214
136 HS, 212
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foucault studies, No 4, pp. 19-52
caesuras within the self can only be seen as symptomatic of a failure to
understand, analyse and treat the emotional agitations which compel us to
constantly seek out another place, another time or another self.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Landesstiftung Baden‐Wurttemberg for its generous
financial support, which enabled me to research this paper while studying at
Heidelberg University. I owe a debt of gratitude to my colleague Michael
Janover, who read several drafts and made countless invaluable suggestions. I
would also like to thank an anonymous referee, whose comments were
incisive and thought‐provoking.
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