L’Herméneutique du sujet  

When we see today the meaning, or rather the almost total absence of meaning [signification], that is ascribed to expressions that are otherwise familiar and often recur in our discourse, such as: return to the self, self-liberation, being oneself, being authentic. When we see the absence of meaning and of thought of each of these expressions as they are employed today, I believe that we shouldn’t be too proud of the efforts made at present to reconstitute an ethics of the self. And it could be that these series of efforts[1] […] more or less stopped, froze on themselves. The moment we find ourselves in is one where we continue to refer to this ethics of the self, whilst never giving it any content. I think that we are almost faced with the impossibility of constituting an ethics of the self today, and this occurs at a time when maybe it is an urgent, fundamental and politically indispensable task, if it is true after all that there is no other point, first or last, of resistance to political power but in the relation of the self to the self.  

In L’Herméneutique du sujet Foucault proposes to analyse the relation between the subject and truth through the notion of the care of the self. This, he admits, might appear to be a roundabout way to question such relation, given that it had been traditionally seen through the lenses of the more popular motto ‘know yourself’. But for Foucault, there are a number of important reasons for the neglect of the notion of the ‘care of the self’ in the history of thought. Foucault writes:

A certain tradition prevents us from ascribing a positive value to all these formulations [regarding the self], and especially from making them the foundation of an ethics. All these injunctions to exalt oneself, to make a cult of oneself etc. sound to us as a kind of challenge and bravado, a will to ethical rupture, a kind of moral dandyism, the affirmation of a state that is aesthetic and unsurpassably individual. Or they sound to us as the expression, a bit melancholic and sad, of a retreat of the individual, incapable of keeping hold of a collective ethics and who, faced with the dislocation of this collective ethics, will no longer have anything but himself to care about.  

The reason for his engagement with this particular notion is that the care of the self, in all the traditions Foucault addresses in his lectures, has a positive value, and it is the starting point of the most austere and rigorous ethics of the West that is not attributable to Christianity. As he notes:  

These rigorous values will reappear both within the Christian and the non –Christian modern ethics in completely different climates. But moral rigour entails an obligation to something other than oneself, be it the other, the community, the nation, class etc. All these themes, all these codes of moral rigour have been founded by Christianity and the modern world on a morality of non-egoism, but learn from techniques of the care of the self.  

Thus Foucault is interested in tracing a genealogy of the care of the self as a notion and practice within the ancient tradition up to early Christianity. His 1982 lectures problematise the relationship between the subject and truth through an analysis of the interplay in antiquity and early Christianity of the practices of care of the self and know yourself; or rather, of the ethical on the one hand and the epistemological on the other, where ethics is defined as an ontological mode of self-transformation. We can detect in this concern a direct problematisation of the ethical consequence of an analytics of truth and by tracing its genealogy; Foucault will also point us towards the conditions of possibility for an ontology of ourselves and an anthropology without a Subject and beyond interiority. He observes that in Antiquity ‘know yourself’ always appears associated and often subordinated to the ‘care of the self’,[2] and sets out to describe the development of their relation: How is the care of the self defined? What is the object of care [the self]?  

It is nothing to go back to. But we do have an example of an ethical experience which implied a very strong connection between pleasure and desire. If we compare that to our experience now, where everybody –the philosopher and the psychoanalyst – explains that what is important is desire, and pleasure is nothing at all, we can wonder whether this disconnection wasn’t a historical event, one that was not at all necessary, not linked to human nature, or to any anthropological necessity.[3]  

This series of lectures attempts to outline the relation between the subject and truth in three main traditions: Plato ( IV BC ), Hellenistic and Roman philosophy (I-II century), and early Christianity (from the III-IV century up until the 17^th century), especially ascetic and monastic practices. The title of the lecture series is misleading, in that Foucault does not write of the hermeneutics of the subject, but rather of all the forms of care of the self that preceded the hermeneutics, hermeneutics being here understood historically as the particular tradition which establishes a certain relation between the subject and truth within early Christianity. The differences between the care of the self and the hermeneutics of the subject will be outlined later, but first a few words on the content of the lectures. There are several references to modern philosophy, the import of which is crucial to position his project within the rest of his oeuvre, especially in the light of the 1984 essay ‘The Subject and Power’.  

The hermeneutics of the subject is recognised as a specific practice and mode of knowledge that started with Christianity around the III and IV century, especially with the monastic practices of Cassen. Foucault traces the history of the subject’s relation to truth in these lectures to show how it was not until Christianity that a mode of care of the self was attached to practices whereby the truth about the subject became the object of self knowledge and transformation. The first subsumption under the rule of religion of such technologies of the self is not taken for granted by Foucault, who thus attempts to highlight the differences as well as continuities between the ancient forms of care of the self and the Christian modes of subjectivation, and hermeneutics of the subject.  

Foucault chooses the Alcibiades as the best text to expose the relation between the subject and truth in Plato’s philosophy. This is mainly due to the appearance in this text of the two notions that will constitute the link for the whole series of lectures: self knowledge and the care of the self. Foucault attempts to unravel the development of their interrelation throughout the three traditions mentioned above. He does so in order to show how spirituality and philosophy came to become separate, or rather, how the subject comes to assume the role of object of his own knowledge and control.  

First of all, Foucault starts with the Alcibiades, the first text where the notion of επιμέλεια εαυτού is problematised. In this text, the appearance in a Socratic dialogue of the Delphic maxim γνώθι σεαυτόν is analysed in relation to the injunction to care for the self. Know yourself appears as one of the conditions for the care of the self, and is explained in terms of knowing one’s limits and ignorance before proceeding to enact the ethical call for self government and self mastery. As Francois Pradeau has noted, before Plato, the ancient Delphic precept had moral and religious connotation and was associated with knowing man’s limited nature in order to avoid excesses and the ύβρις entailed in acting in place of the gods. Foucault lists the Delphic precept alongside two others: not asking more than what is necessary and not promising the gods what you can’t keep. Knowing oneself entailed an attention to oneself in terms of what one needed to know, i.e. one’s mortality and one’s place in the κόσμος. Know yourself, for instance, is the precept used by Aeschylus in his tragedy Prometheus, where the latter is incited to know his human nature and to not challenge the gods. So how did the Delphic precept become associated with the wider call for the care of the self in Socrates?  

In that context, the precept still entails an acknowledgement of one’s non-divine and mortal status, and a call that is more ethical than epistemological. However, its status assumes a more philosophical connotation. By pointing to the subordination of the Delphic precept to the wider technology of the care of the self in Socrates, Foucault aims to underline the non-epistemological nature of the original version of self-knowledge. In other words, he aimed to show how such precept did not entail a subordination of the subject to truth, or an objectification of the subject to the knowledge of its own internal structures. In the Delphic precept, self knowledge is functional to knowledge of one’s position with respect to the gods, so that access to truth in general is strictly dependent on the recognition of the divine in oneself. In the Alcibiades, the first question posed in relation to Socrates’ injunction to care of the self is: what is the self one ought to take care of, and what does this care as activity consist of? These two questions are crucial for Foucault, in that the first poses the question of what the subject is, and in Platonist language, the self is the soul. To know oneself entails knowing one’s soul, which is in turn a mode of knowing the divine in oneself that in Plato also equates with justice. This gives rise to what Foucault calls the paradox of Platonism.

This paradox is at the root of the tradition that will culminate in a hermeneutics of the subject. In Socrates we find what is also called a form of ethical intellectualism, the assumption whereby wrong doing is based on lack of knowledge. This stance does not account for the intention of wrong doing, which will later acquire an important place within Christianity. So, Socrates urges Alcibiades to care for himself, and here the know yourself precept requires an overcoming of one’s unawareness of one’s own ignorance of things. This ignorance of the Soul is one of simultaneously the Divine and Justice. In fact, at the end of the dialogue, Alcibiades tells Socrates that he will occupy himself with himself, or in other words, that he will care for justice. ‘In Platonic reminiscence one finds, united and blocked in one movement of the soul, both self knowledge and knowledge of the truth, care of the self and return to being.’[4]

 Therefore in Plato, the political and cathartic aspects of philosophy are one and the same. However, Neo-Platonism will not only invert the relation between self care and self knowledge, but it will also detach catharsis from politics, through turning one’s attention to oneself into an end detached from the political aim, whereas the relation of Alcibiades to the city was crucial in understanding not only the care of the self but also the art of government in Plato. For Plato, self-government is functional to the government of others. Taking care of the city necessitates taking care of the self and, in turn, to care for the self directly entails a care for the city, since there is a direct reciprocity between the state of the self and the state of the city: one’s well-being being dependent on the other’s. The care of the self in the Alcibiades is also linked to entering one’s adulthood, as a passage from adolescence to maturity, the entry to civic life. The care of the self has a pedagogical role: Socrates urges Alcibiades to care for himself as a mode of modifying his relation to government, where governing oneself cannot be dissociated from governing others.

In the Alcibiades self care is inseparable from the art of governance, of oneself and of others. Alcibiades in fact aspires to govern the city and Socrates shows him through maieutic his shortfall whilst pointing him towards the labour of self-transformation required to undertake such political task. ‘Know yourself’ in Plato takes the form of overcoming one’s ignorance and entails a seizure of the soul, which is accomplished through reminiscence. This is the platonic model of self knowledge.

Secondly, Foucault goes on to analyse Hellenistic philosophy, where the care of the self assumes a different function in the technologies of self-constitution and mastery. He looks at the Epicureans and the Stoics, and outlines the differences between the Socratic version in the Alcibiades and the following versions, coinciding with the so called revolution in ancient Greece and what many have named the birth of individualism.[5] Foucault is interested in the Hellenistic model of the self because in this tradition he claims we witness a form of care of the self that is an end in itself: it is autofinalised, as he puts it. He is asking what is the self in Hellenistic philosophy that is neither subsumed not identified with truth and what are the techniques of the practice of care of the self in a context where a turn to the self amounts to neither a form of reminiscent knowledge, as with Plato, nor an exegesis and renunciation, as with monastic-ascetic practices. He can trace the influences of the Platonic and Christian traditions to modernity, whilst the Hellenistic modality and paradigm he finds lost in history, somehow subsumed within a rigorous ethics turned into religion.  

The theme of know yourself is analysed as the theme of conversion, in its three versions.

This theme is important because Foucault’s notion of déprise de soi is theorised in direct contrast to that of conversion.[6] Foucault notes that in the Platonic tradition, the theme of conversion entails a form of awakening, in fact Socrates is defined as the awakener. It entails a turning towards one’s soul in order to find the truth beyond the images, it is a return to being through reminiscence and it opposes this world to the hyperworld.

In the monastic and ascetic practises, conversion is defined as μετανόια, and consists in a passage, a self transfiguration, a move from death to life, a sudden revelation through self renunciation. By turning towards oneself one can access the truth of the Word and of Revelation only after a purifying work on the soul, whereby the subject converts after renouncing itself, which entails a rupture, a sudden event of death and rebirth. Foucault calls this ‘a sort of interior movement of transubjectification’.[7]

The model of reminiscence, also known as επιστρώφη, identifies self-knowledge with the care of the self, in the sense that one arrives at one’s being by turning upon oneself, so that knowledge of truth and self knowledge are one and the same. However, in the model of monastic practices, of exegesis and renunciation, the care of the self is subsumed and absorbed under the process of self knowledge and self renunciation, so that self knowledge and knowledge of the truth are given in succession, i.e. the subject knows the truth of the Word only after being purified. Monastic practices of the care of the self hence entail a form of vigilance against temptations, against externalities, as well as an exploration of the secrets of conscience (arcanae coscientiae). This is what Foucault also calls auto-exegesis, whereby the subject becomes the object of a true discourse, through a knowledge that entails a work of interiority and the deciphering of the self.

However, the study of Stoicism and Epicureanism presents Foucault with an entirely different and separate form of relation of the Subject to Truth, one which we could call an immanent relation. The traditions of Hellenist philosophy offer a model for self knowledge where the latter is coextensive with knowledge of nature. Foucault obviously recognises and grants the Hellenistic philosophers, especially the Stoics, a view that is wholly immanent, of both the subject, truth and their relation. As Han noted:  

The mode of ancient subjectivation thus forms an exact antithesis to the anthropological structure: the latter is characterised on the one hand by the immediate definition of the transcendental subject as subject of knowledge a priori, on the other hand by the redoubling of the transcendental in the empirical according to the figures of the originary. As one will see, ancient subjectivation operates on exactly opposite presuppositions: on the one hand, the subject is in its natural state incapable of knowing unless it makes itself ‘worthy of truth’, the formation of knowledge itself is not conceived as a process of the epistemological order nor as an end in itself, but as a spiritual transformation of the self by the self, as a ‘conversion’. On the other hand, the subject as such is not regarded as the object of a possible knowledge: on the contrary, ‘where we intend, as modern, the question of the “possible or impossible objectivation of the subject within a field of knowledge”, the Ancient understood: “the constitution of a knowledge of the world as a spiritual experience of the subject”’.[8]  

This is the first distinctive feature of Hellenistic philosophy Foucault is so keen for us to pay attention to. For Seneca, sibi servire, being slave to oneself, is the worst of slaveries; for Foucault, the stoic mode of self-mastery can help us is the search for an antidote to the epidemics of techniques of control that, with the help of scientific, medical and legal knowledges and expertise, function on the basis of the interiorisation of the rule. Important here is Foucault’s analysis of the Stoics’ attitude to representations and the idea that freedom lies in not being passive to the flux of representations whilst not ordering them. This refers to what he sees as a lack of method in the Cartesian path as well as the earliest writings on the relation between spontaneity and receptivity in Kant’s Anthropology as one to do with man’s being citizen of the world. In fact, there are certain features which make the Stoic tradition sharply in contrast with that of Platonism and Christianity, which render it autonomous from what we have previously outlined as the Platonic paradox. One of them is the relation to nature. The immanent philosophy of the Hellenists never separates knowledge of the self from knowledge of the world, in a fashion which renders knowledge useful according to what can be made of it, rather than its validity as a set of logical rules and systematic enunciations.  

This [Demetrius’] critique of useless knowledge does not point us towards the valorisation of a different savoir that has a different content, which would be the knowledge of ourselves and our interior. It rather points us towards a different functioning of the same knowledge of external things. Self knowledge isn’t becoming this deciphering of the arcanes conscientiae, this exegesis of the self that will be developed by Christianity. The useful knowledge, the knowledge where human existence is in question, is a mode of relational knowledge, at once assertive and prescriptive, and that is capable of producing a change in the mode of being of the subject.[9]  

Knowing nature is liberatory for the subject in so far as it places it in relation with the wider rationality of the κόσμος, as agent as well as element of it. For Foucault, it is a case of ‘disengaging [critique] from a humanism so easy in theory and so fearsome in reality; a case of substituting to the principle of the transcendence of the ego, the research into the forms of the immanence of the subject.’[10] This is a crucial aspect of Hellenistic philosophy that we have already explored in our analysis of Foucault’s reading of Kant. In fact the birth of the homo criticus, which sanctions the end of philosophy as spirituality, poses the same problem in Kant’s Anthropology of seeing man both as element and agent, subject and object of knowledge. In this, the problem of immanence versus transcendence is clear: the Stoics can conceive of the two without separation, Kant in the Critiques will not be able to overcome this obstacle in his science, creating man through his doubles, whilst he will endanger his own science in the Anthropology.  

In so far as philosophy regards knowing nature as a recognition of the subject being part and parcel of a wider reason, this tradition also tells us that through knowledge the subject can participate to this rationality. In an expression of Seneca, the subject becomes ‘consortium dei’, looking to itself, ‘contemplatio sui’, entails a reflection on ourselves within the world and of our belonging to the present. A virtuous soul is that which communicates with the entire world. Foucault calls this form of immanence a spiritual modulation of knowledge, where principles of truth are inseparable from rules of conduct.  

Whereas we, the modern, intend the question: ‘possible or impossible objectivation of the subject within a field of knowledge’, the Ancients of the Greek Hellenistic and Roman époque intended it as: ‘constitution of a knowledge of the world as spiritual experience of the subject’. Where we intend: ‘subjectification of the subject under the order of the law’, they meant: ‘constitution of the subject as ultimate end for itself, through and by means of the exercise of truth.[11]  

This brings him directly to the question of παρρήσια. In a lecture delivered at Berkeley University Foucault explains the meaning of this notion, and how important it is in understanding the relation between the subject and truth, in a moment in history that first saw the emergence of sovereignty and the ‘prince’, with correlative alienation of rights and hierarchical structures for decision making.[12] Παρρήσια must be understood as the practice of the self which entails most visibly an unbreakable relation between self-transformation and truth telling. Telling the truth does not entail a set of methodological precautions so that the truth is correctly exposed and understood, but a series of technologies and operations that allow for truth to be and remain something that exists within the bodies of those through which it runs, in a process of subjectivation.

Foucault insists on the fact that the subject and its interiority cannot be a constitutive field of autonomous knowledge and that rather than a discourse that aims to tell the truth about the subject, one has to see the ethical project as working through an embodiment of truth in the subject. Παρρήσια is thus seen as the making of a conduct adequate to the discourse, in relation to the self, whereby truth is neither the best approximation of a discourse to its object nor the transcendental constitution of a field of possible experience, but it is immediately linked to a structure of subjectivation and conduct. Believing that telling the truth can cure, believing in the saving power of confession and the hermeneutics of the self can only ensure obedience. In fact, as philosophy turns into epistemology, spirituality is also progressively incorporated into disciplinary techniques. The hermeneutics of the self is thus the production of the subject by the truth on the subject, the opening up of consciousness as a field of exploration and deciphering, which radically changes the relation between the subject and truth. In the ancient model of the care of the self, the self is not the object of a specific production of truth, but a practice that seeks to transform itself into an active agent, through the subjectification of truth, with the aim of turning oneself into an ethical subject. In the hermeneutics the process is one of telling the truth about the self, and the objectification of the self in a discourse of truth that aims at the production of obedience. Thus through the notion of the care of the self in Antiquity Foucault captures the role of a relation to the self that is grounded on a τέχνη τού βιού, and contrasts it to the form of modern Western subjectivity as that which was constituted the moment ‘βιός ceased to be the object of a τέχνη, of a reasonable and rational art’, in order to become an épreuve of the self, whereby the world, through life, becomes the experience through which we come to know ourselves: the domain, limit and source of such experience, as we saw in Kant. For Foucault, the challenge of Western philosophy lies in answering how it is possible that what is given as the object of a knowledge articulated on the mastering of a τέχνη is at the same time also the place where the truth of the subject and of what we are is tested and arrived at. As he puts it:  

How can the world, which is given as the object of knowledge, be at the same time also the place where the ethical subject of truth manifests and tests itself? How can we have a subject of knowledge that takes the world as its object through a τέχνη, and a subject of self experience that takes the same world, in a radically different form, as the place for its épreuve? And if the task we inherit from the Aufklärung is to interrogate the foundations of our system of objective knowledge, then it is also that of interrogating what the modalities of the experience of the self are grounded on.[13]  

As is the case with other issues, most notably his analysis of power, Foucault’s contribution is itself an épreuve that produces concepts that help us navigate concrete existence. At this point, we would like to advance further and look into those analyses that account for silent practices of constitution that go beyond the self whilst addressing subjectivity today as an ontological question. Foucault’s contribution has been taken up and enriched by Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Christian Marazzi and Maurizio Lazzarato, who in different disciplines have provided the grounds for thinking the social in terms of a production of subjectivity and have been led by their analysis of the political economy of current practices of the self, to approach a notion of biopolitics which can not only help us break out of the power-resistance lock, but also address a realm of self constitution that requires and takes for granted the collective intelligence which forms and informs us as subjects, elements and agents. In the following studies on power and control we would like to move onto an exploration of the present in the critical spirit of Foucault, taking up the challenge of interrogating the modalities of experience of the self today and begin to point towards useful tools for answering the urgent question of an ontology of our present.