I met Michel Foucault personally for the first time when he advised me to present my candidature at the Collège de France in 1980. To my great shame, I must admit that at that time I knew his work rather badly, being too absorbed in my own research. From our first encounter – and I was amazed by it – Michel Foucault, on the contrary, told me that he had been an attentive reader of my works, notably of my presentation on ‘Epistrophè et metanoia dans l’histoire de la philosophie’ at the Congrès de philosophie de Bruxelles in 1953, and especially my introductory article on ‘Exercises spirituels’ in the Annuaire de la Ve section de l’école pratique des hautes études of the year 1975–6.1
From this day onwards, I had the great pleasure to discover for myself – in conversations that were unfortunately too rare, which Foucault himself recalls in the Introduction to The Use of Pleasure – Michel Foucault’s extraordinary personal presence and intellectual acuity.b We talked of the Graeco-Roman philosophy of life, and sometimes of the texts of Marcus Aurelius or Seneca. I still regret not having responded with sufficient precision to the question that he posed to me on the exact sense of ‘vindica te tibi’ in Seneca’s first letter to Lucilius. Unfortunately, his premature death, which came as a shock to all of his friends, interrupted a dialogue that was only just beginning, and from which we would undoubtedly have mutually profited, both from our agreements and also, and above all, from our disagreements. It would take me a long time to be able to precisely examine these agreements and disagreements. For the moment, I must content myself with a brief sketch.
One can observe to what extent our interests and concerns converged by comparing the summaries of Foucault’s 1981–2 course at the Annuaire du Collège de France2 and the article, ‘Exercises spirituels’, of which I have just spoken. One finds, in both, the same themes; be it philosophy as therapy,c Socrates and the care of the self, or the different types of spiritual exercises, like the praemeditatio malorum and the preparation for death. The same is valid for the 1983 article, ‘Self Writing’,3 wherein Foucault takes his point of departure from the examination of conscience in writing, recommended by Saint Anthony to his disciples, which had occupied my attention [in ‘Exercices spirituels et “philosophie chrétienne”’].d Finally, in 1984, in The Care of the Self, the chapter that Foucault devoted to the culture of the self re-examined all of these themes, referring to my researches in the field.e Moreover, the idea, ‘according to which Christianity took up … a certain number of techniques of self-examination which were already in place in the period of Stoicism’,4 is developed at length in this book, following the path of Paul Rabinow.
For Foucault, as for myself, all of this was not solely an object of historical interest. Foucault writes in the ‘Introduction’ to The Use of Pleasure:
The ‘essay’ – which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of communication – is the living substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is still what it was in times past, i.e., an ‘ascesis’, askêsis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought.5
This is how Foucault conceived philosophy at the end of his life, as Paul Veyne’s article, ‘Le dernier Foucault et sa morale’ [‘The Final Foucault and his Ethics’], confirms:
The idea of styles of existence played a major role in Foucault’s conversations and doubtless in his inner life during the final months of a life that only he knew to be threatened. Style does not mean distinction here; the word is to be taken in the sense of the Greeks, for whom an artist was first of all an artisan and a work of art was first of all a work. Greek ethics is quite dead […]; but he considered one of its elements, namely, the idea of a work of the self on the self, to be capable of reacquiring a contemporary meaning, […] the self, taking itself as a work to be accomplished, could sustain an ethics that no longer supported by either tradition or reason; as an artist of itself, the self would enjoy that autonomy that modernity can no longer do without. ‘Everything has disappeared,’ said Medea, ‘but I have one thing left: myself.’6
Foucault’s 1983 interview with Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow also highlights this ‘aesthetics of existence’ which was Foucault’s last conception of philosophy, but which also very possibly corresponds to the philosophy that he concretely practiced throughout his life.7
For my part, I recognize in this work of the self on the self, this exercise of the self, an essential aspect of the philosophical life: philosophy is an art of living, a style of life which engages all of existence.
However, I would hesitate to speak with Foucault of an ‘aesthetics of existence’, both concerning antiquity and regarding the task of philosophy in general. As we have seen, Foucault understands this expression as indicating the meaning that our life is the work that we must undertake.
The word ‘aesthetics’ evokes for us moderns very different resonances than the word ‘beauty’ (kalon, kallos) had in antiquity. Indeed, the moderns tend to represent the beautiful as an autonomous reality independent of good and evil, whereas for the Greeks, on the contrary, the word [kalon, kallos] when applied to human beings normally involved a moral value, as, for example, in the works of Xenophon and Plato that Foucault cites.8 In fact, what the ancient philosophers sought was not primarily ‘beauty’ (kalon), but the good (agathon); Epicurus as much as the other philosophers. Especially in Platonism and Stoicism, the good is the supreme value: ‘the souls of worth despise being for the sake of the good, when they spontaneously put themselves at risk for the sake of their homeland, for those whom they love, or for virtue’.9 This is why, instead of a ‘culture of the self’, it would be better to speak of the ‘transformation’, ‘transfiguration’ or ‘surpassingf of the self”. In order to describe this state, one cannot avoid the term ‘wisdom’, which, it seems to me, appears very rarely, if ever in Foucault. Wisdom is that state at which the philosopher will perhaps never arrive but towards which he aims, by striving to transform himself in order to go beyond his present state. It is a mode of existence which is characterized by three essential aspects: peace of mind (ataraxia), inner freedom (autarkeia) and, except in the sceptics, cosmic consciousness:g that is to say, the process of becoming aware of belonging to the human and cosmic Whole, a sort of dilation or transfiguration of the self which realizes greatness of soul (megalopsychia).
Curiously, Foucault, who gives so much place to the conception of philosophy as therapy, does not seem to remark that this therapy is aimed, above all, at procuring inner peace: that is to say, at delivering the individual from the anxiety provoked by the preoccupations of life and the mystery of human existence: the fear of the gods and the terror of death. All the schools agree on the goal of philosophy, to attain inner peace, even if they diverge when it comes to setting the means to attain this goal. For the Sceptics, the spiritual exercise par excellence is the suspension of judgement (epochê); for the dogmatics – that is, all other ancient schools – one can only accede to inner tranquillity by developing the awareness that one is a ‘natural’ being, which is to say that one is, in some way, a part of the cosmos, and that one participates in the event of universal existence. It is a matter of seeing things from the viewpoint of universal nature, of putting human affairs in their true perspective. In this way, one attains to greatness of soul, as Plato had already said:
The pettiness of mind is incompatible with the soul which must tend continually to embrace the whole and the universality of the divine and the human … Do you think that a soul habituated to great thoughts and the contemplation of the totality of time and being can deem this life of man a thing of great concern? Such a man will not suppose death to be terrible or fearsome.10
In Platonism, as well as in Epicureanism and Stoicism, the liberation from anxiety is thus obtained through a movement by which one passes from individual, passionate subjectivity to the objectivity of a universal perspective. It is a matter not of the fashioning of a self as a work of art, but on the contrary of a surpassing of the self, or at least of an exercise by which the self is situated within this totality and experiences itself as one part thereof.
Another point of divergence between Foucault and I concerns this question: beginning from which historical moment did philosophy cease to be lived as a work of the self on the self (whether to realize the self as a work of art or to go beyondh it in universality)?
My position is that this rupture occurred in the Middle Ages at the moment when philosophy becomes auxiliary to theology and when the spiritual exercises are integrated into Christian spirituality, becoming independent of the philosophical life. Modern philosophy has rediscovered little by little, and only ever partially, the ancient conception of philosophy.i Foucault, by contrast, makes Descartes responsible for this rupture: ‘Before Descartes, a subject could not have access to the truth except by first realizing upon himself a certain work which rendered him able to know the truth.’j But, according to Descartes, ‘in order to accede to the truth, it suffices that I am any subject capable of seeing what is evident’. Thus, ‘evidence replaces ascesis’.11 I am not completely sure that this is exact. Descartes has written, precisely, Meditations, and this word is very important.k Concerning these Meditations, Descartes advises his readers to dedicate a number of months, or at least a number of weeks, to ‘meditate’ the first and second meditations, in which he speaks of universal doubt, then of the nature of the mind.12 This clearly shows that for Descartes also, ‘evidence’ can only be recognized on the basis of a spiritual exercise. I think that Descartes, like Spinoza, continues to be situated within the ancient tradition of philosophy conceived as the exercise of wisdom.13 In this way, one sees the difficulty there would be in writing a history of the ways in which philosophers have represented philosophy.
My reflections here can only skim over the problems posed by Foucault’s work and my intention is to revisit them one day in a more detailed and thorough way. I would only like to stress here how much I regret the fact that our dialogue was interrupted.
For my part, even less than Foucault do I have the pretension of proposing general and definitive solutions to the philosophical problems of our time. I would only confess that, in the same way that Foucault sought in the last years of his life to realize an ‘aesthetics of existence’, so the ancient idea of philosophy as a way of life, as the exercise of wisdom and as the effort towards developing a living awareness of the totality, is for me still valuable and relevant today. And I consider it as a sign of the times – striking and unexpected in my eyes – that at the end of the twentieth century, Michel Foucault, myself and certainly many others, at the conclusion of totally different trajectories, came together in this vital rediscovery of ancient experience.
1Pierre Hadot, ‘Spiritual Exercises’, in Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. M. Chase (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996), 79–125. This article was initially presented in the Annuaire de la Ve section de l’école pratique des hautes études in 1975–1976.
2Michel Foucault, ‘The Hermeneutics of the Subject’, in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. R. Hurley et al. (London: Penguin, 2000), 93–106.
3Originally published as Michel Foucault, ‘L’écriture de soi’, Corps écrit 3 (1983), 3–23. [Translator’s note: Michel Foucault, ‘Self Writing’, in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, 207–222].
4Hubert Dreyfus et Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault, un parcours philosophique (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 349. [Translator’s note: English edition: Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 244]: “Now, we can see that in this activity of the self on itself, the ancients developed a whole series of austerity practices that the Christians later directly borrowed from them. So, we see that this activity became linked to a certain sexual austerity which was subsumed directly into the Christian ethic. We are not talking about a moral rupture between tolerant antiquity and austere Christianity.’ Or, ‘I do not think that the culture of the self disappeared or was covered up. You find many elements which have simply been integrated, displaced, reutilized in Christianity” (250). Hadot seems to be referring to the following reflection, by Rabinow, in the ‘Afterword’: “Foucault, in contrast, when he deals with Christianity narrows genealogy to the appropriation of one already organized set of practices (techniques of self-examination) as the form for another already functioning set of concerns (self-decipherment for the sake of salvation)” (262).
5Foucault, L’usage des Plaisirs, 15 [Translator’s note: Following here the translation in Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 9].
6Paul Veyne, ‘Le dernier Foucault et sa morale’, Critique 471–472 (1986), 939. [Translator’s note: Our translation follows that by Arnold I. Davidson and Catherine Porter, ‘The Final Foucault and his Ethics’, Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (1993): 1–9.]
7Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, un parcours philosophique, 330–331. [Translator’s note : English translation, 231, 235.]
8Foucault, L’usage des Plaisirs, 103–105.
9Saloustios, Des dieux et de morale, vol. 3, trans. Gabriel Rochefort (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1960).
10Plato, Republic, 486a–b.
11Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 345.
12René Descartes, Réponse aux seconde objection (Contra les … Méditations), in Oeuvres de Descartes, eds. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1982), IX, 1, 103–4: “it is not enough to have envisaged a time, it is necessary to examine [the subject of the meditation] often and consider it at length so that the habit of confounding intellectual things with the corporeal … can be effaced by a contrary habit of distinguishing them, by exercise over several days.” Cf. ‘The Divisions of the Parts of Philosophy in Antiquity’ [Chapter 6] in this volume.
13René Descartes, Principes de la philosophie, ‘Préface’ in Oeuvre de Descartes, IX, 2–3: ‘Philosophy signifies the study of wisdom.’ See Spinoza, Ethics, V, prop. 42, scholia.
a [Translator’s note] Hadot’s original included this quote as an epigraph: “… philosophy, if at least it remains now what it was in other times, that is to say, an ‘ascesis’ …” from Michel Foucault’s L’usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 15. Due to copyright issues, we are unable to reproduce this here.
b [Translator’s note] See Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, trans. by Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1992), 7–8:
There was also the danger that I would be dealing with documents with which I was insufficiently acquainted. I would run the risk of adapting them, without fully realizing it, to alien forms of analysis or to modes of inquiry that would scarcely suit them. In dealing with this risk, I have benefited greatly from the works of Peter Brown and those of Pierre Hadot, and I have been helped more than once by the conversations we have had and the views they have expressed.
c [Translator’s note] French: philosophy as une thérapeutique.
d [Translator’s note] See Pierre Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (Paris: Albin Michel, 2002), 75–98. In the original, Hadot does not explicitly mention the title of his article, but uses the expression ‘ici même (p. 90)’, referring to the book which also contains the text, namely Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique. We add the title and exclude the page reference to avoid confusion.
e [Translator’s note] Michel Foucault, ‘The Cultivation of the Self’, in The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3, trans. by Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1990), 37–68.
f [Translator’s note] Hadot’s term, a vitally important one for him, is dépassement. This can mean ‘to go beyond’, ‘to exceed’, ‘to overcome’ (including in the sense of Nietzsche’s ‘self-overcoming’), ‘to overtake’, ‘to go over’, as well as in some contexts, to ‘transcend’. Following Michael Chase, we will translate it with forms of the verbs ‘to surpass’, ‘to exceed’ or ‘go beyond’. It is important to note, however, that in other textual places, Hadot uses the term ‘transcendence’ referring to the same idea. Indeed, it would be legitimate to translate the French phrase here as ‘transcendence of the self’.
g [Translator’s note] Literally, from: conscience cosmique. See Chapter 3 above, and for this threefold distinction, Chapter 10.
h [Translator’s note] Here, again, it would be legitimate to read the expression ‘se dépasser dans l’universalité’ as ‘to transcend oneself in universality’.
i [Translator’s note] See Chapters 1 and 3 above.
j [Translator’s note] Compare: ‘In European culture up to the sixteenth century the problem remains “What is the work which I must effect upon myself so as to be capable and worthy of acceding to the truth?” To put it another way: Truth always has a price; no access to truth without ascesis …’ Foucault, at Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 251–2.
k [Translator’s note] It is important to note that this issue is equally complex in Foucault. For example, in the same text, Foucault says: ‘Second, we must not forget that Descartes wrote “meditations” – and meditations are a practice of the self’, Foucault, at Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 252.