Subjectivity and the " Shocking " : Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and Ethical Limits of Pleasure (original) (raw)

Subjectivity as the Care of the Self: a Foucaultian Reading of Self-care

Postmodern Openings, 2015

This study is considered as a proposal to identify some metaphysical support (non-empirical) of the self-care for a patient suffering from a chronic disease, as an extension of the bio-psycho-social paradigm. The methodology is dominated by a phenomenological perspective, supported by a hermeneutic conceptual analysis of the care of the self in Michel Foucault, focused on the Socratico-Platonic period and pervaded by the intention of having a translation and application to self-care. Foucault pleads for an aesthetics of the self, called subjectivity, in which the subject is selfconstituted through the so-called technologies of the self. The care of the self comes from the resignification of the philosophy as a way of life in which the subject is objectified. The translation and the applicability of the care of the self at the idea level to self-care are identified precisely in the acquisition of some important principles of the philosophy of care of the self from the Greek Antiquity: the role of awakener of consciousness of the one who is concerned about oneself as the first moment of the metaphor of awakening from the sleep, the ēthos as a way of being, a way of behaving and a life model. The pair self-knowledge-care of oneself justifies informing the former by the latter, in which being concerned about oneself means knowing oneself. Nevertheless, knowledge means care of the self where the self is synonymous with the soul and moreover, with the divine element in man.

The Use & Misuse of Pleasure: Hadot Contra Foucault on Hedonistic Modes of Ethical Self-Possession

Chapter II of Foucault’s The Care of the Self (1986b), ‘The Cultivation of the Self’, is undoubtedly one of the most suggestive, and yet controversial, sections of the entire History of Sexuality multivolume series. Suggestive, first, for it is philosophically situated at the critical intersection of an “ever-increasing tension” in Foucault’s Janus-like, late research intentions – that between “writing a reorganized history of ancient sexuality in terms of the problematic of techniques of the self, and […] study these techniques for themselves, in their historico-ethical dimensions” (Gros, 2001, pp. 513-14). Controversial, second, for it eventually became the fiercely contended center of many discussion in contemporary literature. The diatribe was early on ignited by Foucault’s coeval and conational philosopher Pierre Hadot and his critical essay ‘Reflections on the Idea of the ‘Cultivation of the Self’’ (1995), explicitly conceived, as its title suggests, as a direct rejoinder to this precise chapter. Amid a variety of critiques , Hadot contends primarily against Foucault’s presentation of the Hellenistic-Roman ethics (and, more critically, the Stoic) as “an ethics of the pleasure one takes in oneself” (Hadot, 1995, p. 207). Hadot objects Foucault the dissolution of the Stoic antinomy between voluptas (‘pleasure’) and gaudium (‘joy’), and, thereby, the relegation, on the one side, of the latter notion to the subordinate status of “another form of pleasure” (Hadot, 1995), on the other, of Seneca himself to the problematic rank of a pseudo-Epicurean. Yet to appear, and lamentably so, remain in contemporary literature an analysis of Hadot and Foucault’s diverging interpretations grounded on the primary Ancient sources they both made use of, namely, Seneca’s Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium and De Vita Beata – a shortcoming that the present investigation, with its modest contribution, intends to preliminarily mend. Establishing this as its program, the following excursus is thus structured as follows: first, I introduce Foucault’s analysis in ‘The Cultivation of the Self’ (§1); second, I discuss Hadot’s criticism (§2); third, and finally, I’ll put to test Foucault and Hadot’s respective interpretations by consulting Seneca’s writings (§3).

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.

Foucault ' s Aesthetics of Existence

2011

What role has aesthetics in the later work of Mic he I Foucault? In the final completed volumes of his History of Sexuality (translated as Vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure and Vol. 3, The Care of the Self) aesthetic activity becomes a key to his understanding of the vagaries of sexuality in the Greek and Greco-Roman periods. 1 Sexuality in Antiquity is understood by reference to what Foucault variously calls 'the care ofthe self', 'practices of the self', 'techniques of the self' or 'an aesthetics of existence'. As Peter Dews has noted, Foucault here shifts from the seemingly subject-less world encapsulated in the 'death of man' in The Order of Things (1966), to a world of 'self-constituting subjects' busily creating themselves according to aesthetic criteria. I want to argue that Foucault's later work vacillates between recommending some form of aestheticisation of everyday life and a 'problematisation' of the role of the aesth...

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,