Elena: As usual, I’ll just write in my notes as I read the text.
What ties Dewey and Foucault, James and
Nietzsche together [is] the sense that there is
nothing deep down inside us except what we
have put there ourselves, no criterion that we
have not created in the course of creating a
practice, no standard or rationality that is not
an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous
argumentation that is not obedience to our own
conventions.
R. Rorty1
1. Varieties of ethical experience
I would like to begin my essay review with a short détour into the far present, thus moving to
the near past, and finally settling to the proper timing of the book under consideration. This
digression should be read as a way to adjust the optical focus at what I think could be an
interesting frame through which investigating some of the book’s ideas. The validity of such a
path will be critically discussed in the latter paragraph of the essay, once the discussion of—
which at times turns out to be a dialogue with—the book will be fully in place.
In his 1983 interview On the Genealogy of Ethics Foucault traces a fascinating overview
of his work from the late seventies and early eighties, underling the continuities as much as
the discontinuities of his interests for what he calls ‘the techniques of the self.’ The point of
assessing the place of those techniques in the history of western ethics is both that of conveying their significance in the development of western culture, and showing how much the
‡
I dedicate this essay to the memory of Sergio Franzese, whose recent passing away represents a serious
loss, for the philosophical community and beyond. I deeply regret he did not see the essay in print as he
wished, since it is shaped by many stimulating discussions with him on our respective views on these
themes.
1 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xlii.Marchetti: review essay of The Ethics of Energy
127
investigation of such techniques can be instructive to illuminate our present ethical situation.
Foucault’s late journey into the Greco-Latin world and its concern for how to conduct one’s
life in a way that is neither subjected to the laws of society nor to those of religion, represents
in fact an interesting instance of that ‘history of the present,’
2
through which engaging in
neglected and unexplored exercises of self-understanding. He writes
[I] wonder if our problem nowadays is not, in a way, similar to this one, since most of us no
longer believe that ethics is founded on religion, nor do we want a legal system to intervene
in our moral, personal, private life. Recent liberation movements suffer from the fact that
they cannot find any principle on which to base the elaboration of a new ethics. They need
an ethics, but they cannot find any other ethics than an ethics founded on so-called scientific
knowledge of what the self is, what desire is, what the unconscious is, and so on. I am
struck by this similarity of problems.
________________Elena: It’s interesting that nowadays ethics is not founded on religion as if it could be founded on anything else. Religion was and is misused and manipulated but to think that we can do away with religion instead of the misuse and manipulation is like putting in jail the criminals record instead of the criminal. Interesting also that they don’t want a legal system to intervene in their moral, personal, private life as if there could be a moral, personal and private life without a legal system able to stand up for it. “scientific knowledge” of what the self is, what desire is…..? That too is strange because the self is very scientific, absolutely “lawful” but it is only under its “own laws” so to speak, it can only be verified by the individual that becomes conscious of it. It is its own verification so trying to understand the self on scientific theory is an absurd. It can be “lived”, “expressed” “evolved” but not like in an evolving, changing self but “evolved into”, that is, what is unconscious of it can be made conscious of it or it can become conscious of itself as it evolves. In becoming conscious of itself it is not more or less than it was or will be. It always is both immutable and mutable. In its immutability it is and in its mutability it is also equally immutable. This riddle of words is only a riddle in as much as we can’t understand that we are talking about different dimensions. In the physical dimension it is mutable, changeable, limited, material and encompasses all things physical in the spiritual dimension it is immutable but the power behind all mutation. ___________________
3
Foucault is interested in presenting a way of understanding ethical thought as informed by the
idea of a ‘care for the self,’
4 one which runs deep into the history of western culture, as opposed to a conception of morality grounded in a more or less scientific description of what human beings are as seen from a detached and unengaged perspective. According to this alternative conception, which Foucault in a late course calls ‘the pragmatic of the self,’
5
the proper
target of ethical interest is the way human beings conduct themselves: ethics is redefined as
the inquiry into the ‘self’s relationship to itself,’ and in particular into the relationship of care it
establishes with the action, thoughts and values which articulate its moral conduct.
6
Such a
path of reflection about the meaning and nature of ethics can be fruitful to understand, and
possibly change our present situation regarding how to conduct ourselves ethically. However,
as it is clear from his late interviews, Foucault is not interested in finding a solution for our contemporary problems by pointing to some moral criteria endorsed in the past, as opposed to
2 For the locus classicus in which this expression is employed, see the lecture of 7 January 1976 of Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-76, edited by Mauro Bertrani and Alessandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 2003).
3 Michel Foucault, ‚On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of the Work in Progress,‛ in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1983), 231.
4 Foucault dedicates the course of 1982 at the Collège de France to the presentation of his research into the
Greco-Latin conception of ethics as a rapport á soi, which he describes at the same time as an attitude toward
the self, others, and the world; see, Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject. Lectures at the Collège de
France 1981-82, edited by Frédéric Gros (New York: Picador, 2005). Frédéric Gros’ Course Context, which closes the volume, is particularly helpful for the understanding of the place of this seminal course in Foucault’s
intellectual journey.
5 Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others (New York: Picador, 2010), 5.
6
In the course of 1978 at the Collège de France, Foucault tackles the question of the emerging dispositif gouvernemental in the ethical and political western tradition, dedicating the lessons of March 1
st
and March 8
th
to the
analysis of the concept of conduct that is pivotal for his definition of ethics; see Michel Foucault Security,
Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-78, edited by Michel Senellart (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan-Picador, 2009). For the entanglement of the two ‘technical’ notions of conduct and ethics in Foucault, see the ‚Introduction‛ by Arnold Davidson to the Course.Foucault Studies, No. 11, pp. 126-155.
128
the ones currently accepted in our time. An example of such problems could be those concerning sexuality or the liberty over one’s own body. He is rather interested in tracing a
‘genealogy of problems, of problématiques,’
7 which prompted the discovery or invention of new
ways of conceiving one’s conduct as ethically meaningful, so to react to, and escape from,
forms of oppressive coercion by either social or religious institutions and powers. Foucault
warns us that conceiving such ancient techniques as alternative solutions available for us to
address our present moral problems, is unavailing for two orders of reasons, one external and
one internal to morality itself: in the first instance, because the socio-historical situation in
which such ethical practices have flourished is very distant from ours, and secondly because
of variation in the very self-understanding of such practices by the subjects involved. These
two aspects are deeply entangled, and in order to spell out this entanglement Foucault makes
a distinction within ethics, between different aspects of the moral life experienced by the
subjects involved. He discriminates between the ethical substance, the mode of subjection, the
self-forming activity and the telos. These aspects are at the same time connected and independent one from the other, so that changes in the contingencies of historical situation prompt,
but do not overlap with, changes in the way in which subjects experience their own conduct as
ethically meaningful. For example ethical substance (that is the aspect of the self or behavior
concerned with moral conduct and relevant for ethical judgment) may remain the same while
the telos (that is the kind of being we aspire to be when behave morally), the self-forming activity (i.e. the means by which we shape ourselves in order to become ethical subjects) and the
mode of subjection (or the way subjects are prompted to recognize their moral obligations)
may change. Foucault’s examples, taken from the history of sexuality, spanning from the appropriation of classical and late antiquity’s concept of epimeleia heauton in regards to the
meaning and practice of aphrodisia by the early Christian tradition, to the transformation of the
analysis of sexual perversion as we find it spelled out by Augustine and in eighteen century’s
treatises on masturbation, show the danger of postulating the existence of some fixed moral
concepts that are able to account for such a varieties of ethical experiences, since the very
understanding of such concepts changes together with the conditions under which they are
experienced. The very same principle or moral concern can be, and has been, experienced in
very different ways and aimed at opposite results, so that the nostalgia for the return to a
celebrated past, in which our moral life was governed by an unswerving truth exemplified in
some definite moral concepts, appears to him historically as well as philosophically unstable.
These reasons forbid a plain translation between ancient forms of ethical conduct and our
present moral behaviors. According to Foucault, investigating the past—more or less distant
from us—is neither aimed at finding modern solutions to old problems nor at finding old
solutions to new problems, but rather at spelling out the trajectories of the questions that are
still felt as urgent to address in the present. In another revealing interview, Foucault justifies
his interest for the genealogy of ancient practices of subjectivation as motivated by saying
[t]hese ways of thinking and behaving [are] still with us. I try to show, based on their historical establishment and formation, those systems which are still ours today and within
7 Foucault, On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of the Work in Progress, 231.Marchetti: review essay of The Ethics of Energy
129
which we are trapped. It is a question, basically, of presenting a critique of our own time,
based upon retrospective analysis.
8
According to the reading I would like to suggest, passages like these claim that our interest for
those ancient techniques lies in their being a model for thinking about moral reflection itself.
One of Foucault’s main interests is showing how a certain enlightenment project
9
for the
establishment of universal principles of moral evaluation on the base of which judging the
moral quality of a certain conduct was doomed to fail, given the clash between its appeal to
some immanent anthropological features human beings should realize in order to behave
morally and the widespread variety of moral experiences that characterizes the history of
human societies. However, this failure does force us to give up saying something interesting
about moral reflection. In fact, according to Foucault what is still possible and worth-while
exploring through a genealogical analysis of such practices is a model for understanding what
morality altogether could look like. In another late interview Foucault writes
[F]rom a strictly philosophical point of view, the morality of Greek antiquity and contemporary morality have nothing in common. On the other hand, if you take them for what
they prescribe, intimate and advise, they are extraordinary close. It’s the proximity and the
difference that we must bring to light and, through their interplay, we must show how the
same advice given by the ancient morality can work differently in the style of contemporary
morality.
10
Foucault’s incursions into the classical and early-modern worlds aim at showing that even if
moral behaviors undergo substantive transformations, what underlies them, i.e. a certain way
of thinking moral reflection, can survive its many possible declinations and be fertile to address our present problems concerning how to conduct ourselves morally. In order to achieve
this goal, what is needed is not another normative model, but rather an analysis of the forms
in which the self’s relation to itself have been problematized.
________Elena: This makes sense if all we wish is to understand the problems but if we understand the problems we understand the structure that holds the solutions. The paradox lies in the fact that WE do not all understand everything therefore WE cannot all be conscious of the problems or the solutions NOW. Each individual holds the possibility in his and her own time. That is time and eternity in their own realm: the realm of living beings.___________
In Nietzsche, Genealogy, History
Foucault describes his philosophical method as genealogical after Nietzsche’s, and presents it
as follows:
[G]enealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that
8
John K. Simmons, ‚A Conversation with Michel Foucault,‛ The Partisan Review, 38 (2), (1971), 192.
9 Foucault is attentive in distinguishing a Leibniz-Wolff-early Kantian variant of enlightenment from a
Hume-Rousseau-late Kantian variant, the former being concentrated in sorting out an all-inclusive principle
of rationality capable of assessing human thought and conduct, while the latter interested in showing the
developing character of our claims of knowledge and action and how reason and reflective though is
nothing but one among the devices that can be used for their assessment. Foucault tackles incidentally this
theme in his What is Enlightenment?, in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1984), 32-50; for a wider discussion of these authors and their respective lineage, see Jerome B.
Schneewind, ‚Toward Enlightenment: Kant and the Sources of Darkness,‛ in The Cambridge Companion to
Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Donald Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 328-
351.
10 Michel Foucault, The Return of Morality, in Foucault Live (Interviews 1961-1984), edited by Sylvère Lotringer
(New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 468.Foucault Studies, No. 11, pp. 126-155.
130
operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is not to demonstrate that the
past actively exists in the present, that it continues secretly to animate the present, having
imposed a predetermined form on all its vicissitudes< *O+n the contrary, to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to
identify the accidents, the minute deviations-or conversely, the complete reversals-the
errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that
continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the
root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents.
______________Elena: This is completely absurd: “To discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents” simply means that whoever wrote that was chained to the exteriority of accidents without understanding the truth about his own being. The exteriority of life can and cannot be accidental. The being of the individual attracts the “exteriority” of life just as the Fourth Way System postulates but What Life? One of the problems with these explorations by Foucault and these writers is that they are trying to understand ONE of the phenomenon without considering all of the phenomenon. We cannot tap into the truth and being without understanding that we have to deal with karma or understand karma without understanding that we have to deal with action and acting or deal with the “exteriority” without understanding the “verb”, acting or action. We cannot understand our selves, our self, or the world and its phenomenon if we cannot understand the “life” that holds us together. _______________
11
Foucault’s genealogy of morality is aimed at showing the varieties of ways in which something—as an interest for the ethical self—has surfaced out of some practices and experiences.
This way of thinking moral reflection is very unlike a normative model as we find it spelled
out in the modern western ethical tradition, in its relative silence about the individuation of
the principles according to which moral appraisal or criticism should be pronounced. The
contrast that such a genealogy brings to the fore is between a picture of morality as the articulation of the principles human beings ought to follow in order to be moral and a picture of
ethics as the analysis of the ways in which human beings have conceived their conduct and
interiority as morally relevant. Ethics is for Foucault a methodological and not a substantive
notion, and refers precisely to a peculiar way of conceiving one’s relation with oneself, that
can be, and has been, articulated in different ways and driven by opposite concerns. In the
third chapter of L’Usage des Plaisirs Foucault gives a perspicuous characterization of the contrast between moral codes as the observance of normative or customary codes and ethics as
the shaping of one’s self according to some ideals it helps establish through an act of endorsement. This is a contrast emphasized with different tones and even terminology by Nietzsche
and James as well, as a contrast between a morality the self merely receives or applies and an
ethics it invents by forming its self inspired by some ideals. It is important to understand that
Foucault is not suspicious of moral codes per se, but rather he is suspicious of the sublimation
of such codes as the only aspect of one’s conduct that is ethically relevant. Foucault thinks
that what is important in the characterization of one’s ethical life is the relationship the self
establishes with those very moral codes: that is, its capacity of accepting, interpreting or
refusing them as revealed in its practices of self-formation. According to Foucault in fact,
one’s ethical conduct must be distinguished from one’s moral behavior: both belong to what
Foucault labels as morality, but they refer to very different aspects of our subjectivity. While
moral behaviors denote the accordance of one’s actions to the rules and values prescribed by
certain agencies through the establishment of moral codes, ethical conduct refers to one’s
movements of self-constitution according to some practices and activities in which the self
develops a relationship with itself. The two aspects are distinct but indissoluble, since one’s
ethical conduct expresses the very reaction one can have in respect to moral codes, so that
their different understandings will determine one’s formation in accordance with, or critical
opposition to them. Foucault gives great emphasis to the moment of dissent, whose importance is even greater than that of endorsement, since by refusing the moral and political cate-
11 Michel Foucault, ‚Nietzsche, Genealogy and History,‛ in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 81.Marchetti: review essay of The Ethics of Energy
131
gories and institutions, which are supposed to inform our conduct, we create the possibility
for new experiences that can also improve those very categories and institutions we have
resisted. The notion of counter-conduct, whose first explicit appearance in the work of Foucault is datable to 1978’s Lectures at the Collège de France (see note 5 for reference), represents
the hub that connects the notions of conduct and care of the self. It is in the moment of
counter-conduct that the self constitutes itself as an moral self, since conducing in a way that is
alternative to—but not in bare opposition with—the field of options that is given to us by a
particular power or historical contingence, requires working on ourselves such that we engage
in some practices and experiences whose aim is that of shaping our liberty within the boundaries of a certain field of possibilities.
12
Given this distinction,
13 Foucault characterizes ethics as a
[p]rocess in which the individual delimits that part of himself that will form the object of his
moral practice, defines his position relative to the precept he will follow, and decides on a
certain mode of being that will serve as his moral goal. And this requires him to act upon
himself, to monitor, test, improve, and transform himself.
_________Elena: This is no other than the same idea of work on one’s self in any true system of knowledge. It makes all the sense. The former subject on the separation between what is moral and ethical is still not so clear, the separation is questionable. What may be interesting about the separation is that what is not moral is not necessarily not human so it is unethical to judge it and condemn it without the “ethical” compassion that the case requires. In as much as he limits the ethical to the individual’s relationship with itself, he takes away the possibility of social consciousness or the legal ethics that would protect “immoral individuals” from compassionate, conscious treatment. _______
14
This picture of ethics is very instructive if seen on the background of Foucault’s engagement
with Nietzsche, and in particular with his genealogical method for the assessment of the western ethical tradition. Nietzsche’s analysis of morals, under the form of a genealogy, is aimed
at showing the epistemological and psychological underpinnings of contemporary moral
thought. Nietzsche is interested in unraveling the philosophical and psychological foundations of contemporary moral thought, in order to show its unsatisfactory grounds and suggest
an alternative built into a new philosophical and psychological conception of human beings
15
.
His concern is that of ‘re-evaluating values’ by liberating the self from self-imposed habits and
moral codes. According to Nietzsche, the first and necessary step for the achievement of a rich
12 An excellent characterization of this intertwinement is given by Foucault in his ‚Friendship as a Way of
Life,‛ in Michel Foucault, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, edited by
Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997). See also, ‚The Social Triumph of Sexual Will‛ and ‚The
Ethics of the Concern for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,‛ both in Foucault, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-
1984, vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth.
13
I would like to thank Alan Rosenberg for some useful advices about Foucault’s terminology, and for his
encouragement to make my ideas clearer on this point. For further considerations about the relationship
between ethics and morality in Foucault see Arnold I. Davidson, ‚Archeology, Genealogy, Ethics,‛ in
Foucault: Critical Reader, edited by David C. Hoy (Oxford: Basic Blackwell, 1986); James W. Bernahuer &
Michael Mahon, ‚Michel Foucault’s Ethical Imagination,‛ in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (2
nd
edition),
edited by Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Michael Mahon, Foucault’s
Nietzschean Genealogy (Albany: SUNY, 1992).
14 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage, 1990), 26.
15
If this amounts to saying that Nietzsche is advancing a philosophical anthropology is a matter I cannot
pursue here. Both Nietzsche and Foucault are explicitly refuting any anthropological backup of their discourse, although it should be précised which kind of anthropology they are resisting. For an interesting
analysis of this theme, see Béatrice Han, ‚The Analytic Finitude and the History of Subjectivity,‛ in The
Cambridge Companion to Foucault (2
nd
edition), edited by Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005).Foucault Studies, No. 11, pp. 126-155.
132
and authentic ethical life is precisely the refutation of any received morality and the human
beings we are when thinking and acting under the unreflective and unengaged sway of such a
morality. Instead of being the object of moral concern, the self, for Nietzsche, is its very result:
the self is something we have to form, attain and achieve in order to be moral. Nietzsche’s
refutation of the moral self as a given, amounts to a refutation of ethics as the inquiry of the
condition of possibility of moral appraisal of the self in favor of a conception of ethics as the
inquiry of the condition of the moral constitution of the self.
His treatment of exemplarity, especially in writing such as The Uses and Abuses of
History for Life, Schopenhauer as Educator and Daybreak, represents the cornerstone of his genealogical project of showing the unsatisfactoriness of moral reflection, conceived as the justification of values established independently from any practice of endorsement by the individuals whose life is governed by such values. Nietzsche’s critique of morality begins with the
question ‘How can I confer upon my life the greater value?’, and proceeds with the instruction
that what is needed—above all—is a vigilant skepticism toward all inherited concepts. It is
only by questioning the validity of such moral concepts that we earn the possibility of claiming some values that are really expressive of our moral life. Up to a certain amount, the self
that is the target of moral evaluation emerges from this very activity of skepsis in which what is
at stake is its very identity as a moral subject. Through questioning its received thoughts and
habits, the self discloses the possibility to constitute itself as a moral subject, that is as a subject
responsible for the values it endorses and morally healthier than the one it was before such
questionings. According to the reading given by James Conant, which stands in fierce opposition to the one given by Thomas Hurka,
16 Nietzsche’s statements, rather than advancing an
elitist and aestheticist picture of the moral self, suggest an image of human beings as ‘progressive beings,’
17 whose task is that of recognizing their capacity for grasping values out of their
practices and experiences of subjectivation. Nietzsche’s purpose is critique,
18
and his attacks on
received thoughts, prescriptions and codes are provocations aimed at shaking our deep
convictions about the sources and groundings of our moral ideas. Nietzsche asks us to acknow-
16
James Conant, ‚Nietzsche’s Perfectionism,‛ in Nietzsche’s Postmoralism, edited by Richard Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Thomas Hurka, Perfectionism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993). A hint of response by Hurka to Conant can be found in ‚Nietzsche: Perfectionist,‛ in Nietzsche
and Morality, edited by Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For a companion reading of Nietzsche as a perfectionist thinker, see Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), ch. 11.
17 The characterization of human beings as progressive beings is depicted by John Stuart Mill in the first
chapter of On Liberty. For a compelling reading of Mill as a perfectionist thinker and fellow traveler of the
authors we are discussing, see Piergiorgio Donatelli, ‚Mill’s Perfectionism,‛ Prolegomena, 5 (2), (2006).
18 For by now classical readings of Nietzsche’s genealogy as critique, see Bernard Williams, ‚Nietzsche’s
Minimalist Moral Psychology,‛ in Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
Philippa Foot, ‚Nietzsche’s Immoralism,‛ in Moral Dilemmas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); David C. Hoy,
‚Nietzsche, Hume and the Genealogical Method,‛ in Nietzsche, Genealogy and Morality, edited by Richard
Schacht (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and Alasdair MacIntyre, ‚Genealogies and Subversions,‛ in Nietzsche, Genealogy and Morality. For a fresh analysis and an up-to-date comparison between
Nietzsche and Foucault on this aspect, see Hans Sluga, ‚I am Simply Nietzshean,‛ in Foucault and Philosophy,
edited by Timothy O’Leary and Christopher Falzon (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).Marchetti: review essay of The Ethics of Energy
133
ledge the perspectiveness
19 of our values and truths, and thus take responsibility for this fact
by behaving consequently, both in our intellectual and in our practical life. He writes
[w]hatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new
ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the
organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master
involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous ‛meaning‛ and
‛purpose‛ are necessarily obscured or even obliterated<*t+he entire history of a ‛thing,‛ an
organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and
adaptations whose causes do not even have to be related to one another but, on the contrary,
in some cases succeed and alternate with one another in a purely chance fashion. The
‛evolution‛ of a thing, a custom, an organ is thus by no means its progressus toward a goal,
even less a logical progressus by the shortest route and with the smallest expenditure of
force, but a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subduing, plus the resistances they encounter, the attempts at transformation for
the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results of successful counteractions. The form
is fluid, but the ‛meaning‛ is even more so.
_____________Elena: These paragraphs on or by Nietzsche couldn’t be more beautiful or accurate. They are a splendid description of being in a continued actualization of itself.__________
20
Given the perspectiveness of our values and the provisional character of the situations in
which they are experienced and exercised, Nietzsche calls for the endorsement of an active
stance toward our thoughts and actions, and thus the education of them in order to achieve
that Emersonian ‘unattained but attainable self’ through which we could experience and express at full our moral life.
21
Both the ability to experience values and to have experiences that
are valuable must be cultivated, and a genealogy of morals would prompt us to recognize the
history of the struggles over self-formation by means of this questioning morality from within
its very exercise. As Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg have suggested, we can give
Nietzsche’s alleged nihilism a negative as well as a positive characterization, according to
Nietzsche’s remark that ‘it can be a symptom of increasing strength or increasing weakness.
22
Corresponding with the negative characterization, the absence of a transcendental system of
values makes human begins incapable to act and causes their will to perish.
______________Elena: Maybe it’s here where we can realize that the absence of a transcendental system of values makes human beings capable of tremendous atrocities. The point here is to understand that all human beings are acting under a “system of values”, an “intellectual structure” that impulses and justifies all committed atrocities. Basically it is important to realize that the danger we are in is that even people without transcendental values ACT out their “will”. “Criminals” are not criminals because they are in any way different in their inner structure to non criminals, they are criminals because they are unconscious to an extent that other people are not. We need to be able to delineate what is “life” and “life-giving” for our selves in order to understand when, how, why and what is not “life” or “life-giving”. We all go through different phases of “criminality” in our lives but when the pathological aspects of criminality cannot be overcome then we are in a dangerously destructive process. ______________
Following the positive characterization, however, such an absence prompts one’s will and sensibility to create
own values by shaping oneself in a certain way.
______Elena: It’s interesting that although all that is written here is true in terms of what is work on one’s self, no one who has not actually worked on him or herself can actually understand what is being said. It is all written and said as if all that “happened” to the self. As if an individual could “will” himself to “be” by doing this or that instead of simply “being” or complexly being, and in that “being” “willing” his or herself to ACT against the moral programming that has conditioned his and her life until he or she stand up and Act from their own self.
What is lacking in these descriptions is the understanding that to develop all these strengths an individual must “Trust” his and her own self first. It is not will alone. Trust is the other side of the coin of will. Will is the power of trust. When we reach that understanding we realize we are no longer in the realm of the intellect but in the realm of the heart and perhaps that is why it is somewhat obscure in the male tradition that we are studying. Just as Will is “the act of”, trust is “the being of”. As a quality of being “trust” is a force of its own. In willing itself to act positively or negatively in relation to the conditioned morals under which an individual has been “formed” or “educated”, another “force” has entered the process: the force of the spirit: light: trust.___________
There is no better declaration of this principle
than the one stated in §6 of the preface to The Genealogy of Morals, where Nietzsche writes
[L]et us articulate this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values
themselves must first be called into question—and for that there is needed a knowledge of the
conditions arid circumstances in which they grew. Under which they evolved and changed
19 For an assessment of this aspect of Nietzsche, and its relevancy for contemporary reflection on ethics, see
Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), exp. introduction and ch. 13.
20 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (New York: Vintage, 1989), 77-8.
21 For the Emersonian echoes in Nietzsche’s philosophy, see the first chapter of Stanley Cavell, Conditions
Handsome and Unhandsome. The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1990).
22 Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, ‚The Aesthetic and Ascetic Dimension of an Ethics of Self-Fashioning: Nietzsche and Foucault,‛ Parrhesia, 2, (2007).Foucault Studies, No. 11, pp. 126-155.
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(morality as consequence, as symptom, as mask; as tartufferie, as illness, as misunderstanding; but also morality as cause, as remedy, as stimulant, as restraint, as poison), a
knowledge of a kind that has never yet existed or even been desired. One has taken the
value of these ‛values‛ as given; as factual, as beyond all questions.
23
Questioning one’s values means questioning the experiences to which such values are attached, and the activities that constitute the background of meaningfulness and legitimacy of
those very experiences. Foucault elaborates Nietzsche’s insight in a fruitful direction, giving
moral reflection an interesting characterization: by investigating the ways in which human
beings have shaped themselves accordingly to some practices and ideals it is possible to
understand the varieties of ethical experiences they have undertaken. Ethical experiences and
not moral principles stand at the centre of moral reflection, the aim of which is organizing
such experiences according to the role they play in the lives of the subjects involved.
______Elena: This is so beautifully true BUT we must be able to go beyond THAT: Beyond the individual into the social and allow for the consciousness that is acquired to live itself out in the legal system. If we limit the ethical work to the inner life of the individual that experiences the turmoil of reflection then we do not set the basis for a more balanced human life in the evolution of mankind. Each generation must consolidate the inner struggles of its individuals which comprise the whole emotional sphere of religion (understood as the inner-feminine realm) into the legal, socio-political reality (that corresponds to the sphere of the masculine intellectual realm). One of the great difficulties of our times is that the masculine force is overwhelming the feminine force to the detriment of “life”.___________
This
achievement requires work on one’s self that is very unlike the one expected by merely
conforming or agreeing to a set of norms that one lives by. Experiencing, and especially moral
experiencing, requires work on one’s self, since authors—in order to experience something as
valuable the self—must be a in a peculiar state of mind which prompts conduct that is transformative of its own sensibility. In this alternative conception of moral reflection the target of
moral interest shifts from mere actions and motives to the whole conception of one’s own
conduct. This self-understanding becomes the very object of moral concern for it is only by giving one’s life a certain shape—that is, by conducing oneself in a certain way—that one comes
to appreciate a variety of moral experiences which are excluded when it unreflectively lives
with the values it merely inherits as given.
In what follows I shall argue that some of these insights are echoed in the ethical
thought of William James. What James, Nietzsche and Foucault share is a conception of ethics
as an activity of self-care. According to these authors, individuals constitute themselves as
ethical subjects by being attentive to the experiences and thoughts that are transformative of
the way in which they conduct themselves. Notwithstanding the differences in both their
style and interests, I will claim that these authors have shaped their ethical investigations
departing from the very same question, namely: ‘what does it take to have a moral
experience?’, and claimed that the answer should have the form: ‘to take care of one’s own
self.’ Nietzsche and Foucault trace this answer back into the history of western culture—with
some interesting incursions into eastern thought as well—while James investigates its possibility by assessing the state of art of modern ethical thought, concentrating in particular on its
two most representative parties, that is empiricism and rationalism, as well as on their European and American contemporary developments. James sees the achievement of this alternative way of conceiving moral reflection as a consequence of a proper focus on the moral
psychology and epistemology on which moral experiencing is grounded, while Foucault sees
this as the result of the play (jeux) of the historical contingencies human beings encountered in
their practices of subjectivation. Nietzsche would have subscribed to James’ characterization
of the entanglement between ethics and psychology, agreeing at the same time with Foucault’s
claim about the historicity of its understanding by the subjects involved. Thus, despite the di-
23 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 20.Marchetti: review essay of The Ethics of Energy
135
versities of style and interests, these three philosophers share a common concern in respect to
a certain way of picturing moral thought and its relation to the moral life it should address.
By investigating the way in which individuals become ethical subjects through engaging in the
relevant experiences, these authors suggests a way of thinking moral reflection as an analysis
of the practices and conducts that give access to such experiences.
While the literature about Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s approaches to this particular
theme is wide and growing, the interest for this aspect of James’ moral philosophy has been
meager and the connection with his pragmatist philosophy overlooked. In fact, James’ moral
philosophy has barely been considered on these lines, while much emphasis has been given to
the alleged promethean character of his ethical reflection, which would have committed him
to an elaborate version of utilitarianism.
24 Sergio Franzese’s compelling book The Ethics of
Energy. William James’s Moral Philosophy in Focus represents a notable exception in Jamesstudies. In fact, in this book the author explores a number of interesting features of James’ moral reflection that have been largely ignored: most notably, the idea that we can understand
the nature and point of ethics only through a more imaginative look at our moral life. This
path of investigation is aimed at undermining the grounds on which the standard reading of
James’ ethical thought rests, since it puts in question the very feasibility of moral theory as it
has been usually conceived.
Franzese’s book, whose exposition of James’s moral philosophy asserts itself among the
most interesting assessments in James scholarship, both for its attentive reconstruction of
James’ position and for the innovative character of its interpretative line, advances a reading of
James’ moral philosophy as an inquiry into the nature and shape of moral reflection itself. The
most interesting aspect of Franzese’s book is its main argumentative line, i.e. the claim that the
major interpretations of James’ moral philosophy rest on the mistake that what James was
advancing was a normative system of morality. Through the analysis of his moral writings,
Franzese shows how James was instead interested in depicting an alternative way of
conceiving morality altogether. It is important to notice, however, the book’s intended disinterest for Foucault: the author aims at a critical exposition of James’ moral thought and of its
anthropological commitments, while some space is given to its intertwinements with the work
of Nietzsche—especially with his though on the ethical importance of ‘the care, development
and control of human force.’ Thus, after presenting the arguments advanced in his book, I
would like to conclude by explaining why, despite the author’s resistances, another ally of
James and Nietzsche on this particular aspect of their work is Foucault. I shall argue that the
connection between these three authors should be traced in their shared struggle against what,
following Richard. J. Bernstein, I will call a Cartesian conception of the self, and in particular
the companion foundational anxiety for what regards its epistemological as well as its moral
24 The most authoritative defender of this reading is Richard M. Gale, The Divided Self of William James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Even if Gale’s James is far from the one sketched in the book
under review, this work presents a powerful interpretation of his philosophy and is plenty of interesting instructions about some fundamental issue about morality and psychology, for example concerning the question raised in the note 25.Foucault Studies, No. 11, pp. 126-155.
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powers.
25
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