Foucault’s “Spirituality” and the Critique of Modern Morality (original) (raw)
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A Critical Consideration of Foucault's Conceptualisation of Morality
Verbum et Ecclesia, 2024
The background of this research is the status and significance of an ethics of care of the self in the history of morality. I followed the following methodology: I attempted to come to nuanced, critical understanding of the Foucault’s conceptualisation of morality in Volumes II and III of The History of Sexuality. In the ‘Ancients’, Foucault uncovered an ‘ethics-oriented’ as opposed to a ‘code-oriented’ morality in which the emphasis shifted to how an individual was supposed to constitute himself as an ethical subject of his own action without denying the importance of either the moral code or the actual behaviour of people. The main question was whether care of the self-sufficiently regulated an individual’s conduct towards others to prevent the self from lapsing into narcissism, substituting a generous responsiveness towards the other for a means-end rationale. I put this line of critique to test by confronting Foucault’s care of the self with Levinas’s primordial responsibility towards the other and put forward a case for the indispensability of aesthetics for ethics. In conclusion, I defended the claim that care of the self does indeed foster other responsiveness. Intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary implications: Foucault’s ethics, understood as an ‘aesthetics of existence’ has profound intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary implications, as it challenges traditional ethical normative ethical theories and engages with various fields of philosophy, social sciences and humanities. Interdisciplinary fields greatly influenced by Foucault’s ethics include: psychology, literary, cultural,
The Ethical Self in the Later Foucault: the Question of Normativity
Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions, vol. 62, n. 2, 2023, pp. 381-403.
Michel's Foucault's later work has been the subject of much critical interest regarding the question of whether it provides a normative stance that prescribes how the self ought to act. Having first outlined the nature of the debate, I engage with Foucault's comparative analysis of the ethical systems of ancient Greeks and Christianity to show that he holds that the former maintains that the ethical subject was premised not on adherence to a priori rules as in Christianity, but from and around an ongoing process of practical experimentation. From this, Foucault goes on to describe the practices through which the self acted to make and re-make itself, which leads to the question of whether such descriptions also contain prescriptions as to how the self should act. I argue that they do contain a prescriptively normative stance, but in a very specific sense. Rather than delineating the specific ethical commitments we should adopt, Foucault takes off from the example of the ancient Greeks to insist that individuals should adopt an indeterminate orientating principle based on absolute openness to each context, with this principle given content through a context-specific, spontaneous, ongoing , and inherently individual, albeit socially situated, process of practical experimentation. The result is a highly original account of normativity that makes individuals absolutely responsible for themselves and their ethical activities in each moment.
Foucault Studies, 2004
In his last two books and in the essays and interviews associated with them, Foucault develops a new mode of ethical thought he describes as an aesthetics of existence. I argue that this new ethics bears a striking resemblance to the virtue ethics that has become prominent in Anglo-American moral philosophy over the past three decades, in its classical sources, in its opposition to rule-based systems and its positive emphasis upon what Foucault called the care for the self. I suggest that seeing Foucault and virtue ethicists as engaged in a convergent project sheds light on a number of obscurities in Foucault's thought, and provides us with a historical narrative in which to situate his claims about the development of Western moral thought.
Exploring Michel Foucault’s Move from Power and Knowledge to Ethics and the Self
2014
In this dissertation, I will consider the multiple trajectories of the thought of Michel Foucault in the 1970s and 1980s, offering an approach through which his writings on power and knowledge on one hand, and ethics and the self on the other can be understood fruitfully in relation to each other without being seen as representing a radical break in his work. I will do this by, first, locating the question of the subject and its formation within Foucault’s works on disciplinary power and sexuality, paving the way for this question to be revisited through his later writings on ethics. I will then consider how the development of Foucault’s ideas on power into biopower and governmentality enable an approach through which continuity within Foucault’s works can be identified through the relations between power, conduct and modes of individualisation. This will lead to considering Foucault’s genealogy of ethics and the modern subject not as a departure from his earlier ideas, but as the culmination of his interest in analysing knowledge, power and ethics. I will consider but go beyond the notions of aesthetics of existence and care of the self in Foucault’s discussion of ancient Greek and Hellenistic ethics in order to deal with his ideas on parrhēsia and truth-telling from his final lecture courses at the Collège De France that show that his late ideas reflect his earlier concerns. Therefore, by appealing to the conceptual developments within his writings as well as his approach to philosophical analysis, Foucault’s philosophical projects need not be seen as disparate and so the issue of continuity in his work can be raised and positively viewed.
University of Wales PhD submission, 2006
French philosopher Michel Foucault takes a very specific aesthetic interpretation in his proposal for the constitution of the moral self in his late work on ethics, work that is located in the ancient world of Greece and Rome. The thesis writer examines the contours of that approach, and brings it to the level of a critical reflection with the aid of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor and three theologians. Foucault’s construction of the moral self is rooted in autonomous aesthetic-freedom, which calls into question norms, rules or codes, and especially prohibitions, focusing on a positive elaboration of the self. It marshals certain technologies of self for self-creation to produce a certain beautiful style of self or an aesthetics of existence. The analysis focuses on the triangular relationship between power relations, truth games and subjectivity. It is a bold and imaginative proposal for ethics in late modernity. Taylor responds to this approach with an appreciation of its cre...
Foucault, Ethical Self-concern and the Other
Philosophia, 2008
In his later writings on ethics Foucault argues that rapport à soithe relationship to oneselfis what gives meaning to our commitment to 'moral behaviour'. In the absence of rapport à soi, Foucault believes, ethical adherence collapses into obedience to rules ('an authoritarian structure'). I make a case, in broadly Levinasian terms, for saying that the call of 'the other' is fundamental to ethics. This prompts the question whether rapport à soi fashions an ethical subject who is unduly self-concerned. Here we confront two apparently irreconcilable pictures of the source of moral demands. I describe one way of trying to reconcile them from a Foucaultian perspective, and I note the limitations in the attempt. I also try to clear away what I think to be a misunderstanding on Foucault's part about what is at stake in the choice between these pictures. To clarify my critique of Foucault, I also relate it to a similar recent critique of virtue ethics by Thomas Hurka.
Se dépendre de soi-même. A Critique of Foucault’s Ethics
Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico, 2020
Between the first and the second volume of The History of Sexuality there is a gap of eight years in which Foucault did not publish anything except interviews. Analyzing some of those interviews, the article reconstructs the reasons that lead Foucault to abandon the thematization of power's constraints imposed on the subject and start to elaborate an ethics in which the subject can be rid of him or herself thorough a care of pleasure(s). Arguing how this change does not represent for Foucault a denying of his previous work but its evolution, the article shows that, despite Foucault's attempt to establish a discourse other than psychoanalysis, his ethics of sexuality unwittingly returns to the "force" that psychoanalysis recognizes as animating sexuality.
Towards a History of Moralities: A Foucaultian Reading of Kant's Moral Project
Within the larger context of the analyses on the relations between subjectivity and truth which defined the late stages of his work, Foucault begins to developed a new conceptual instruments to which he gives the name of "regimes of truth". If up to that point, his questioning on the ways in which power is exercised was shown in its interrelatedness to "systems of knowledge", now he will begin to interrogate power so as to examine what might it reveal about the kinds of relations that the subject have established and keep establishing with the truth. The notion of regimes of truth becomes, then, a means for questioning whether, and to what degree, could it be possible to speak of an apparatus of obligations, constrains and incentives that would result in modes of subjecting ourselves to the truths that we, in turn, decide to accept and recognize as such. Taking as our basis the idea of a mode of subjectivation that would take place as a result of procedures of truth-manifestation and truth-recognition, the present project will interrogate the way in which Kant's moral project can be shown to incorporate (or at any rate to be complemented by) certain elements that are external to the system of a priori demonstrations of the moral law, and whose effect would be that of obligating subjects to recognizing the law, and in such a way as to compel them to perceive themselves as the autonomous, legislating authors of its imperatives. In this sense, our current analysis will not necessarily follow Seigal 2 Foucault's description of the practices of the self, or the ethical work upon ourselves that are, according to him, part and parcel of every moral system. Rather than an attempt at evaluating the practices through which the Kantian subject would come to constitute itself as an autonomous being, and, as such, as the author of categorical imperatives (a project that would be somewhat analogous to the one which Foucault himself develops in the various volumes of The History of Sexuality), we would rather look at how the mechanism by which Kant compels us to perceive ourselves as such and such ethical beings (legislative and autonomous), cannot dispense with what I will call an "apparatus of sensibility", that is to say , a particular "regime of truth" or mode of subjecting ourselves to the recognition of the universality of the moral law.
Foucault on Ethics and Subjectivity: Care of the Self and Aesthetics of Existence
Foucault Studies , 2015
This paper considers the structure of the ethical subject found in Foucault’s late works on ethics, and gives an account of his two major ethical concepts: “care of the self” and “aesthetics of existence.” The “care of the self,” it is argued, gives Foucault a way of conceptualising ethics which does not rely on juridical categories, and which does not conceive the ethical subject on the model of substance. The “care of the self” entails an understanding of the ethical subject as a process which is always in a relation, specifically in a relation to itself. Using his essay “What is an Author,” it is argued that the subject of the “aesthetics of existence,” like the author of a text, is understood to be fully immanent to the “object” which it is usually considered to be opposed to and separated from. Rather than aiming at a true expression of an “authentic” inner substance, Foucault’s “aesthetics of existence” leads instead to practices of “creativity,” whose form cannot be given in advance.
Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2013
comprehended, if not completely, then at least in several of its fundamental characteristics, as a vast project of inventing, critical assessment of the ethical not only an important transformation in our understanding of the history of ethics and also of the history of subjectivity, but to biopolitical normalization. In or roots of the violent rejection, coming from only a more or less sterile exercise in critical th ethical and social practices whose goal is to favor the self-fashioning of individuals and/or a spiritual conversion of a sort. I will suggest that a complete rebuttal of this ancient vision of philosophy could be seen as a perfect illustration of the complex web of power/knowledge relations that structure the philosophical and cultural paradigm dominant nowadays, one that eventually reduces philosophy to nothing more than a