Political Resistance or Retreat? Foucault and Arendt
Michael Ure
This chapter examines Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt’s reception of Roman Stoic ethics. Arendt and Foucault’s analysis of Stoicism develops in the context of a remarkably similar analysis of modernity. Both argue that since the eighteenth century we have crossed the threshold of political modernity: governance, they claim, has become a matter of regulating life processes rather than protecting or facilitating freedom (see Agamben 1998; Dolan 2005; Blencowe 2010; Ucnik 2018). In the age of biopolitics, as Foucault calls it, “security” remains the decisive criterion of political legitimacy and the aim of governance. For Arendt, this is less the security of the juridical subject against violence than “the security which permits the undisturbed development of the life process of society as a whole” (Arendt 1968: 150). On their account, political modernity is not a domain of freedom, as Arendt imagined it was for the ancient Athenians, but is oriented toward the total administration of life processes for the sake of population security and health.1
Despite sharing what we might call this biopolitical account of modernity, Arendt and Foucault radically diverge in their analysis of how we might overcome the breach between freedom and politics. One of their key differences comes to light in their mutually incompatible reception of Roman Stoicism.2 Drawing on Hellenistic philosophies, especially Roman Stoicism, Foucault argues that reconstituting their ethic of the self’s relationship to itself “is an urgent, fundamental and politically indispensable task,” if it is true that “there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself” (2005: 252).3 Foucault claims that reconfiguring the ancient care of the self is somehow essential to contemporary political resistance. On the other hand, following Hegel, Arendt argues that, in response to the decline of political freedom in the late Roman Empire, the Roman Stoics invented the idea of absolute freedom within oneself and in doing so set the seal on what she sees as a strictly nonpolitical concept of freedom. Arendt therefore deplores Stoicism for legitimating the claim that freedom resides in the self’s relationship to itself rather than in the political domain. If, as she maintains, Roman Stoics developed a “nonpolitical” concept of freedom, their philosophy is the very last place we should look to challenge biopolitics. On her analysis, this project requires restoring the political domain as a space of freedom, not fleeing inward to escape the total administration of life.
Yet, Foucault shows that ancient Stoic ethical practices did have recognizably political aims or effects: viz., the cultivation of civic virtue. As Diogenes Laertius puts it, “The Stoics say that the wise man will take part in politics, if nothing hinders him . . . since . . . he will restrain vice and promote virtue” (Laertius 1925: 7.121). We should not therefore consider its ethics of the care of the self as merely an anti-political flight from the world. At the same time, however, it remains the case that Foucault fails to demonstrate that these practices are among the indispensable means for motivating political resistance. Put simply, Stoic practices of the self exclusively aim at cultivating virtue (aretē), or rational self-sufficiency, not the desire to exercise political power.
I develop this argument first by examining Foucault’s late “return” to the theme of self-cultivation and his attempt to differentiate the Hellenistic, and especially Stoic, ethics of the self from Platonic and Christian practices. In Section 2, I outline Arendt’s Hegelian-inspired rejection of Stoicism as a flight from the political domain and Foucault’s justifiable criticisms of this indictment of Stoic freedom as purely nonpolitical. In Section 3, I show how Foucault correctly challenges this Arendtian conception of Stoic ethics as a retreat from politics. In the final section, however, I suggest that while Foucault demonstrates that Stoic ethics is compatible with the cultivation of natural and civic virtues, he does not establish that it can facilitate political resistance, as he conceives it. Indeed, I argue in close that on closer examination the Stoic ideal of rational self-sufficiency is in fact antithetical to political resistance.
1. Foucault Return to the Subject
Let us first briefly consider Foucault’s path toward his late interest in the ethics of the care of the self. In his 1971 essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History,” Foucault sketches the genealogical method he later applied in his ground-breaking and disconcerting critique of modern disciplinary power. Foucault explicitly acknowledges the Nietzschean aims and methods of his historical studies of modern institutions and practices:
“If I wanted to be pretentious, I would use the term ‘genealogy of morals’ as the general title of what I am doing” (1980: 53). He also describes Discipline and Punish as a “genealogy of the ‘modern soul’ . . . a soul born out of the methods of punishment, supervision and constraint.” (1975: 29)
Many critics argue that Foucault’s embrace of Nietzsche’s genealogical method necessarily entailed an endorsement of one or another Nietzschean concept of liberation. Foucault founded his Nietzschean critique of modernity, so his critics assumed, on a Dionysian ideal of transgressive, excess expenditure (Bataille) or an elitist, experimentalist and socially indifferent aesthetic of self-fashioning (Baudelaire) (see Wolin 2006). Foucault’s Nietzschean ethics, they argue, underpin his alleged rejection of the modern liberal state, liberal norms, and the modern disciplinary practices that he identifies as creating docile, self-disciplined, moralized subjects. Like Nietzsche, Foucault seems to object to modern power regimes because they create Nietzschean “last men” so thoroughly adapted to their environment that they are incapable of the untrammeled, excessive expenditure of force. While many of Foucault’s critics shared his concern about the domination of instrumental rationality and its construction of a compulsive identity, they did not, as he seemed to, denounce subjectivity, the self’s relation to itself, as a principle of domination. As Dews put it:
There can be no doubt that the central intention of this form of genealogy, as it is developed in Foucault’s work from Madness and Civilization to History of Sexuality is to dissolve the link—inherited by the Marxist tradition from German Idealism—between consciousness, self-reflection and freedom—and to deny that there is any progressive political potential in the ideal of the autonomous subject. (1987: 160)
It seemed clear to his critics that, as a Nietzschean genealogist, Foucault diagnosed the self-reflexive moral subject as a sick animal born of coercion and discipline, a symptom of nihilism and decadence.
Yet, of course, in his later works Foucault returns to the subject, reconsidering the self’s relationship to itself in his work on the Greco-Roman philosophies and their arts of living. In his late works on ethics, Foucault recognizes that his earlier notion of the subject as a mere effect of power constituted one of the major deficiencies in his thinking, and it was precisely to the Hellenistic ethics of the self that he turned in thinking about an alternative to the juridical and disciplinary models of selfhood. Hellenistic ethics, he suggests, centers on the self’s relationship to itself. Even if, as Veyne observes, Foucault thought it would be undesirable and impossible to resuscitate Greek ethics, he nonetheless
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, in the manner of one of those pagan temple columns that are occasionally reutilized in more recent structures. We can guess at what might emerge from this diagnosis: the self, taking itself as a work to be accomplished, could sustain an ethics that is 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. (Veyne quoted in Davidson 2005: 128)
Foucault suggests that our skepticism about the Hellenistic ethical principles of “caring for oneself,” “withdrawing into oneself,” or “being in oneself as a fortress” derive from deeply entrenched contemporary prejudices. We refuse to give the Hellenistic ethics of the self-positive value, to make the injunctions to “exalt oneself,” or “to devote oneself to oneself,” the basis of a morality (2005: 13), he argues, partly because we assume that it necessarily constitutes a withdrawal of the individual from collective morality and worldly politics (2005: 13).
In the modern European philosophical tradition this prejudice stems from the eighteenth-century German philhellenic tradition, with its privileging of the Greek ideal over Latin Rome (Butler 1935 [2012]), which found its locus classicus in Hegel’s characterization of Stoicism as a retreat inwards prompted by the alleged demise of the Greek polis (see Hegel 1977; Ure 2016). Foucault aims to free us from this prejudice and, in doing so, give positive value to the Hellenistic ethics of the care of the self. Against the entrenched view, Foucault aims to show that reconstituting the ethics of the care of the self is important to contemporary movements that seek to resist or reverse political power. Liberation movements, he suggests, suffer from the fact that they do not want to base themselves on religious beliefs, legal imperatives, or allegedly objective, scientific norms, yet they lack an alternative principle on which to base the elaboration of a new political ethics (Foucault 1984: 343). Foucault maintains that a reconstituted ethics of the care of the self might answer to this need.
His late lectures make it clear then that Foucault had too quickly been made the apologist of an aesthetics of existence or a morality that consisted in a call to systematic transgression. Indeed, his critics failed to heed Foucault’s own explicit warnings against anachronistically treating the ancient care of the self as “a sort of moral dandyism,” insisting that it was the basis for “extremely strict moralities” (Foucault 2005: 12–13; see also Hadot 1995: 206–13; Hadot 2011: 136; Agamben 2016; Gros 2005: 530; Sellars 2019).
In these late lectures, Foucault does not reject the principle of subjectivity or agency, but through a genealogy of ethics he seeks to identify alternatives to modern subjectivity. He came to see that, while Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals and his own genealogy of the modern soul may have exposed the origins, limits and dangers of one particular model of the self’s relationship to itself, it by no means exhausted our storehouse of ethical models of self-cultivation. In his late genealogy of ancient ethics Foucault discovers a whole range of alternative ethical relationships of self to self: “A treasury of devices, techniques, ideas and procedures, and so on, that cannot exactly be reactivated, but at least . . . constitute, a certain point of view, which can be a very useful tool for analyzing what’s going on now” (Foucault 1984: 350).
Foucault especially focused his attention on the Hellenistic and Roman ethics of care of the self. The Hellenistic model of conversion and its spiritual exercises provided Foucault with a paradigm for his own conception of philosophy as an “askesis or an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought” (Bénatouïl 2016: 370). Foucault suggests that Hellenistic ethics formulates a singular model of the return or conversion to the self that distinguishes it from Platonic and Christian models of conversion: “The Hellenistic model, which I want to analyse was concealed historically and for later culture by two other great models: the Platonic and Christian models. What I would like to do is free it from these two models” (Foucault 2005: 254). As we shall see, in Foucault’s Hellenistic-inspired ethics “salvation” or freedom resides not in transcendence to a higher reality through recollection (i.e., Platonic) or through a sacrificial break within the self (i.e., Christian), but in a conversion to the self that takes the form of complete self-sufficiency.
We can say then that Foucault’s late genealogy of ethics charts the history of different models of ethics conceived of as practices of self-transformation or self-transfiguration; recovers the Hellenistic model of ethical self-transformation as a “counter-theme” that has been overshadowed by Platonic and Christian models; and importantly, in doing so suggests that this model has significance for contemporary political resistance. Is Foucault right to claim that the Hellenistic model of self-cultivation, or any reconstituted version of it, can facilitate, motivate, or ground political resistance? If critics of Foucault’s Nietzschean genealogy of modern power worried that it lent itself to an unconditional, indiscriminate contempt for liberalism and the modern self-reflective subject, the worry regarding Foucault’s attempt to reconstitute the Hellenistic ethics of the self lies in what we might conceive as its anti- or nonpolitical conception of freedom. We shall assess this criticism in detail below.
Before turning to Foucault’s attempt to connect the ancient Hellenistic and Stoic ethics of the self with the question of politics, we first need to briefly sketch his account of the Hellenistic model. If, as he suggests, we should reconstitute or reinvent a singular, distinct Hellenistic model of the ethics of the self, rather than the other two fundamental forms of experience (the Platonic and Christian models), we need to know what are its essential or necessary elements. Any new, reconstituted version of Hellenistic ethics must share some significant resemblances with its original model. What then does Foucault identify as the essential or constitutive features of the Hellenistic model that must form part of any reconstituted model of the ethics of the self?
Foucault illuminates the singularity of the Hellenistic model by contrasting it with the Platonic and Christian models of self-cultivation. In the Hellenistic philosophies, he suggests, we find a whole array of images of the self turning round to itself: “We must apply ourselves to ourselves, that is to say, we must turn away from everything around us. We must turn away from everything that is not a part of ourselves . . . in order to turn round to the self” (Foucault 2005: 206). In these images of “turning around towards the self by turning away from what is external to us” Foucault identifies what he calls the “central nucleus” of the Hellenistic care of the self, viz. the notion of conversion (2005: 206–7). We can therefore clarify Foucault’s account of the constitutive features of the Hellenistic model by examining the way he differentiates our fundamental models of conversion: Platonic, Hellenistic, and Christian.
Foucault distinguishes the Platonic and Hellenistic models in schematic fashion. First, whereas the Platonic conversion operates along the axis of transcendence, the Hellenistic conversion operates along the axis of immanence. That is to say, in the Platonic conversion the philosopher ascends beyond this world of appearances to a higher metaphysical reality. By contrast, the Hellenistic conversion does not take the form of an ascent beyond the world, it is a conversion that remains within the immanence of the world, insofar as it takes place through a move from what does not depend on us (external goods or fortune) to what does depend on us (virtue or reason). Second, Foucault suggests that whereas the Platonic conversion requires a radical break of the self with the body, the Hellenistic conversion is the achievement of harmony of the self with itself. Finally, he suggests that in the Platonic conversion the fundamental part of the conversion takes place though knowledge, or recollection of the forms, whereas in the Hellenistic conversion the essential element is much more askesis, exercise, and training rather than knowledge (2005: 210).
Foucault also suggests that in the Hellenistic and Roman culture of the self we discover completely difference processes at work from those in Christian conversion (Foucault 2005: 212). He claims that whereas the Christian conversion requires self-renunciation and rebirth in a new type of being, the Hellenistic conversion does not require a break within the self, but only a break with “what surrounds oneself so that it is no longer enslaved, dependent, and constrained” (2005: 212). In other words, the Hellenistic conversion frees the self from the external world, from the bonds of fortune, for the benefit of the self. “It is a break with everything around the self,” as he puts it “for the benefit of the self, but not a break within the self” (2005: 213). The sole objective of the Hellenistic conversion is to return to the self as the only source of invulnerable sovereignty, as a fortress or citadel.
This Hellenistic model of conversion, he claims, develops a mode of knowing nature that makes knowledge an instrument of self-transformation. Foucault suggests that his Hellenistic mode of knowing nature transforms the self in particular ways. First, the Hellenistic mode of knowing of nature enables individuals to become autarkic (self-sufficient); second, it enables them “to take pride in what is their own and not what derives from circumstances . . . establishing a total, absolute, and limitless mastery over that which depends on oneself” (2005: 241). “It is a knowledge of nature, of phusis . . . that can transform the subject into a free subject who find within himself the possibility and the means of his permanent and perfect tranquil delight” (2005: 241).
Foucault identifies this modalization of knowledge for the sake of freedom and happiness with the spiritual exercise of the “view from above,” “one of the most fundamental forms of spiritual existence found in Western culture” (Foucault 2005: 283; see also Hadot 1995: 238–50). “One of the most distinctive features of [the Hellenistic] care of the self,” as Davidson notes, “is its indissociable link with this cosmic consciousness; one philosophical aim of this care of the self is to transform oneself so that one places oneself in the perspective of the cosmic Whole” (Davidson 2005: 129). Foucault takes this spiritual exercise as emblematic of the Hellenistic modalization of knowledge of nature for the sake of the self’s conversion, its return to complet e self-sovereignty. The view from above enables the Stoic to affirm the whole as the expression of Divine providence: “Understanding the rationality of the world in order to recognize . . . that the reason that presided over the organization of the world, and which is God’s reason itself, is of the same kind as the reason we possess that enables us to know it” (Foucault 2005: 281). Second, the view from above establishes a criterion of value that identifies the good with divine reason and thereby enables the Stoic to
grasp the pettiness and the false and artificial character of everything that seemed good to us before we were freed. Wealth, pleasure glory: all these transitory events will take on their real proportions again when, through this stepping back, we reach the highest point. . . . Reaching the highest point . . . enables us to dismiss and exclude all false values and all the false dealings in which we are caught up, and to take the measure of this existence . . . and our smallness. (2005: 277)
Taken as a measure of our existence, this Hellenistic/Stoic view from above does two things: on the one hand, it reveals the divine reason of the whole and on the other it “punctualises ourselves in the general system of the universe” (2005: 278).
The upshot of the Stoic view from above is that the sage can affirm the rational necessity of the world; his sovereignty and self-mastery consist in affirming every event:
What is great down here? It is raising one’s soul above the threats and promises of fortune; it is seeing that we can expect nothing from it that is worthy of us. . . . What is great is a steadfast soul, serene in adversity, a soul that accepts every event as if it were desired. In fact, should we not know them if we know everything happens by God’s decree? . . . What is great is having one’s soul at one’s lips, ready to depart; then one is not free by the laws of the city but by the laws of nature. (Foucault 2005: 265)
Hellenistic conversion requires dilating the self beyond itself, bringing about that cosmic consciousness in which one sees the human world “from above” (Davidson 2005: 135). The Hellenistic sage’s internal freedom, as Davidson notes, is recognized by all the philosophical schools as the:
Inexpungible core of the personality, which they located in the faculty of judgment, not in some psychologically thick form of introspection . . . . Internal freedom of judgment leads to autarkeia, self-sufficiency, which assures the sage ataraxia, tranquility of the soul. The dimension of interiority in ancient thought . . . is in service of a freedom to judge that will guarantee one the independence of wisdom. It is an internal life ultimately concentrated around the sage in oneself, therefore allowing the philosopher to separate himself from passions and desires that do not depend on him. (2006: 138–9)
We can identify the essential feature that Foucault claims distinguishes the Hellenistic model from Platonism and Christianity with what he calls its “self-finalization” thesis (2005: 206). Foucault argues that in the Hellenistic period the self gradually emerged as a “self-sufficient end”; the self, as he put it, became the “definitive and sole aim of the care of the self” (2005: 177). The Hellenistic ethical ideal is to achieve a certain relationship of the self to itself, a relationship of self-possession and self-delight. Its ethical summum bonum is just this relationship of self to self.
Foucault elaborates this Hellenistic ideal as a type of “salvation” (2005: 182). In the Hellenistic model, as he conceives it, salvation has a positive meaning: it is training oneself to achieve a continuous “sovereignty over the self” that has as its final aim and end rendering oneself:
Inaccessible to misfortune, disorders, and all that external accidents may produce in the soul. . . . The two great themes of ataraxy (the absence of inner turmoil, the self-control that ensures that nothing disturbs one) and autarky (the self-sufficiency which ensures that one needs nothing but the self) are the two forms in which . . . the activity of salvation carried on throughout one’s life, find their reward . . . in a certain relationship of the subject to himself when he has become inaccessible to external disorders and finds satisfaction in himself, needing nothing but himself. (Foucault 2005: 184)
In sum then, Foucault maintains that, in the Hellenistic and Roman philosophy conception of salvation, “the self is the agent, object and instrument, and end of salvation” (2005: 185). The ultimate reward of the Hellenistic care of the self is complete, untroubled self-sufficiency.
It is precisely after elaborating this Hellenistic model of conversion that Foucault maintains we urgently need to reconstitute it because, so he implies, there is “no first or final point of political resistance” (2005: 252), except in the relationship of the self to the self. Yet, as we have already observed, Foucault recognizes that by means of the Hellenistic conversion “one is not free by the laws of the city but by the laws of nature.” In other words, he tacitly concedes that the Hellenistic ethics of the self may leave one enslaved by the laws of the city, yet free by the laws of nature. On this view, it seems that the freedom the Hellenistic philosopher aims to realize is not that of participating in political action or citizenship, but rather the philosophical or internal freedom achieved by ascending to a god-like view of nature. Let us briefly turn to this criticism of politics as an ethics of self by looking at Arendt’s Hegelian-inspired critique of the Stoic and Hellenistic conception of freedom as nonpolitical.
2. Arendt: Stoicism as Political Retreat
Arendt maintains that Hellenistic ethics identified freedom exclusively with practices of the self that aim at inner sovereignty. Epictetus, she suggests, attempts to show that “man is free if he limits himself to what is in his power, if he does not reach into a realm [the political realm] where he is hindered. The art of living consists in knowing how to distinguish between an alien world over which man has no power and the self over which he may dispose of as he sees fit” (Arendt 1968: 147). According to the Hellenistic ethics of the self, therefore, one can be a slave in the world and yet still be free. “Stoicism” as she avers “rests on the illusion of freedom when one is enslaved” (Arendt 1958: 235). It is this sense, she argues, that Hellenistic ethics formulates a nonpolitical conception of freedom: it conceives freedom simply as a matter of the quality of the will, as the self exercising sovereignty over itself, and holds that this can be achieved in any political context or regime; inner freedom or self-sovereignty is independent of the political domain. Foucault himself acknowledges that from the Stoic principle that one must devote oneself to the god within each and every one of us, our divine reason, it follows that we need not concern ourselves with our social or political standing; these are extrinsic, accidents of our existence, not “authentic marks of a mode of being” (Foucault 1986: 93).
Arendt explains away this Stoic ethics as a symptom of the demise of political citizenship:
It was originally the result of an estrangement from the world in which worldly experiences were transformed into experiences within one’s own self . . . into an inwardness to which no other has access . . . inwardness as a place of absolute freedom within one’s own self was discovered in late antiquity by those who had no place of their own in the world and hence lacked the worldly conditions which . . . [are] a prerequisite for [political] freedom. (1968: 145)
In the context of Roman Imperium, Arendt claims, Stoics, barred from exercising political freedom, transposed political relations into the relationship of self to itself (see Arendt 1968: 148). The ethics that Foucault draws from the Hellenistic schools seems to entail precisely this transposition of political liberty into the self’s relationship to itself. “All the exercises,” he explains, “tend to establish a stable and full relationship of the self to itself that can be thought . . . in the juridico-political form of full and entire ownership of the self . . . [Freedom] consists in the immanent and concentrated fulfilment of the self” (Foucault 2005: 533; italics added).
Arendt’s fundamental complaint about this Hellenistic ethics of the self is that by identifying freedom with an inner quality of the will, a relationship of the self to itself, it necessarily divorces freedom from politics. Political freedom, she argues, is not an attribute or quality of the will, a matter of how the self relates to itself, but a matter of acting in the public domain or the space of appearances. Political action, she argues, therefore also necessarily entails a loss of sovereignty insofar as political agents can never control the meaning or consequences of their actions and are held to account for these uncontrollable outcomes. For Arendt, the Hellenistic ideal of uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastery is strictly nonpolitical because the political actor is necessarily non-sovereign. In the political domain, as she puts it, it is impossible to “safeguard one’s sovereignty and integrity as a person” (Arendt 1958: 234).
Arendt argues that not only does Hellenistic ethics turn on a nonpolitical conception of freedom, it also maligns worldly, political action on the grounds that it necessarily jeopardizes this inner, nonpolitical freedom. Because it identifies freedom with the sovereign relationship of the self to itself, Arendt claims that Hellenistic ethics
accuses [political] freedom of luring man into necessity . . . condemns action, the spontaneous beginning of something new, because its results fall into a predetermined net of relationships, invariably dragging the agent with them. . . . The only salvation from this kind of freedom seems to lie in non-acting, in abstention from the whole realm of human affairs. (1958: 243)
Arendt then identifies Hellenistic ethics with a nonpolitical conception of freedom that promotes abstention from the realm of human affairs and condemns the political domain as a threat to personal integrity or self-sufficiency. She therefore deplores Stoicism as one of the seminal philosophical and popular sources that legitimates the belief that freedom resides in the self’s relationship to itself rather than in the political domain. Politics as an ethics of the self’s relation to itself and the correlative notion that freedom resides in exercising power over oneself, she argues, derives from the loss of political freedom, accords absolute superiority to inner freedom, and condemns the political domain, as a “fallen” realm. Does Arendt’s critique of Roman Stoicism expose the political limits of Foucault’s recourse to this ethics of self-cultivation?
3. Foucault: Stoicism as Political Resistance
In The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault addresses a version of this kind of Arendtian objection to Hellenistic ethics: “When salvation is thus defined as the objective of a relationship to self which finds its fulfilment in salvation—the idea of salvation as no more than the realization of the relationship to self—does this point become completely incompatible with the problem of the relationship to the Other?” (2005: 192) Are “the cathartic” (salvation of self) and “the political” (salvation of others), as he puts it, definitively separated?
Foucault, of course, answers this question in the negative. He suggests instead that Hellenistic ethics reverses the Platonic scheme: in the Platonic scheme, one cares about oneself in order to care about others; in the Hellenistic scheme one takes care of oneself “because you are the self, and simply for the self,” and care for others comes about “as a supplementary benefit” or as the “correlative effect of the care you must take of yourself, of your will and application to achieve your own salvation” (2005: 192). According to Foucault, the aim of the Hellenistic care of the self is not therefore the removal of oneself from the world, but preparing oneself as a rational subject of action for events of the world.
Here Foucault properly qualifies Arendt’s misleading assertion that in Hellenistic ethics salvation lies in nonaction or abstention from the political realm (see also Hadot 1995: 274). More accurately, as he observes, in this art of living, one’s relationship to things, events, and the world is refracted through the principle of maintaining the relationship of sovereignty over oneself, of finding salvation in complete possession of oneself. “In the common Stoic attitude,” Foucault suggests, “the care of the self, far from being experienced as the great alternative to political activity, was rather a regulating component of it” (2005: 543). Foucault suggests that the sovereign, free individual can act in the world to fulfill his natural duties as long as in doing so he/she maintains this relationship of self-possession or sovereignty.
Foucault elaborates the politics of the care of the self through a brief excursus of Seneca’s preface to the fourth book of his Natural Questions. By “putting all the sovereignty he exercises . . . within himself, or more precisely, in a relationship of himself to himself,” as Foucault explains Seneca’s point, the Roman official or functionary “will be able to define and delimit the performance of his office to only those functions it has been assigned. . . . He can exercise his power as good functionary precisely on the basis of this relationship of self to self” (2005: 377–8). By contrast, Seneca claims that individuals who lack self-sufficiency, who seek to secure their value through external goods, are in danger of losing themselves “in the presumptuous delirium of power that exceeds its real functions” (377).
Foucault demonstrates then that the Hellenistic and Stoic “theme of the conversion to the self should not be interpreted as desertion of the domain of activity but rather as the pursuit of what makes it possible to maintain the relationship of self to self as the principle, as the rule of the relationship to things, events and the world” (Foucault 2005: 537–8). Yet, he does not show how any reconstitution of this Hellenistic ethical model might generate political resistance. The Roman official who finds in the principle of self-sufficiency the means of limiting himself to his official functions is hardly an example of political resistance, any more than Weber’s ideal bureaucrat is a figure of political freedom. Foucault later slightly modifies his claim about this connection between the ethics of the self and political resistance, seeing the relationship of the self to the self as one among many “possible point[s] of resistance to political power—understood of course, as a state of domination” (1996: 448).
Foucault’s qualification helpfully clarifies what he means by political resistance, but at the same deepens these doubts about whether Stoic self-cultivation is a means to achieve this end. Here he suggests that the relationship one has to oneself is a point of resistance not to political power as such, but rather to states of domination. Foucault simply asserts that power is a necessary fact of the world. “I do not think a society can exist without power relations,” he remarks, “if by that one means the strategies by which individuals try to direct and control the conduct of others” (1996: 446). Foucault takes as an empirical fact a strategic interpretation of society as a domain of agonistic conflict against a communicative conception of society as oriented toward mutual consensus or recognition.4 He conceives this agon in terms of a continuum stretching from total domination at one pole to an open-ended network of power at the other. He identifies political power as an open-ended strategic game between individual liberties who compete with one another to control each other’s conduct. “Rather than speaking of an essential freedom,” as he explains, “it would be better to speak of an ‘agonism’—of a relationship that is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle, less of a face to face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation” (Foucault 1982: 790).
A state of domination, by contrast, is a condition that eliminates these “games” of power and with them the possibility of reversals and transformations of who exercises power over whom. As Foucault explains, these are cases in which “power relations are fixed in such a way that they are perpetually asymmetrical and allow an extremely limited margin of freedom” (1996: 441). What distinguishes states of domination from games of power is not that in the former individuals have no ability to resist exercises of power, but that their resistance cannot reverse their situation. These individuals might evade some of its deleterious effects, but power relations are fixed such that they cannot overthrow the state of domination. In the context of domination, those subject to control and coercion can never themselves become agents of power capable of controlling or coercing those who exercise power over them. They are permanent victims, never agents.
Foucault then aims to identify practices of the self that allow citizens to play such games of power with as little domination as possible (Foucault 1996: 446). As he conceives them, games of power necessarily entail individuals imposing constraints on or exercising power over others. He wants to identify practices of the self that allow us to play such open-ended games of power. He acknowledges that this requires a revaluation of the “moral” fear of power. Foucault is impatient with this moral convention. He encourages a revaluation of this conventional valuation, partly on the basis of what is, or so he implies, a tacit, universal knowledge at odds with this moral convention. “Power” as he declares emphatically “is not evil. Power is games of strategy. We all know that power is not evil! . . . to wield power over the other in a sort of open-ended strategic game where the situation may be reversed is not evil” (1996: 447, emphasis added).
Foucault does not assert that wielding power over others is good. However, he does set out to discover or reconstitute practices of resistance to those forms of domination that significantly limit the scope of individuals’ ability to engage in games of power. Foucault values practices of the self to the extent that they make it possible to expand the margin of freedom so that individuals can engage in such games. He does not object to asymmetrical power relations, but only to asymmetries that prevent the emergence of new asymmetries, or to power exercised in such a way as to prevent the play of power. Foucault’s political goal then is to find ways to resist states of domination so that individuals can play strategic games “in which some try to control the conduct of others, who in turn try to avoid allowing their conduct to be controlled or try to control the conduct of others” (Foucault 1996: 447). He does not defend political resistance in the name of securing and protecting negative liberty, or freedom from external constraint, or expanding c ommunicative action, but for the sake of sustaining conditions that allow individuals the freedom to play games of power in which they exercise or they have the potential to exercise power over others. The target of Foucauldian resistance is domination, not power.
Are Stoic or neo-Stoic ethical practices capable of cultivating citizens who resist domination for the sake of reclaiming the political domain as a continuous, open-ended agonistic competition for power? Is a reconfigured Stoic care of the self among those practices that are indispensable to such political resistance?
4. Stoicism as Civic Virtue
As we have seen, Foucault defines power as a network of asymmetrical relations that are permanently and necessarily open to reversals of fortune. In this agonistic conception of “the political,” victims can always become agents and vice versa. Yet Stoic self-fashioning does not motivate individuals to engage in agonistic power relations in which they are vulnerable to all the turns of fortune’s wheel; instead it enables them to perform their natural and public duties by making them indifferent to external goods and reversals of fortune. Its ethical aim is to create rational agents of action who perform these duties no matter what their circumstances. In this particular sense, as we have seen, Stoic self-cultivation does have specifically political effects. Ancient Stoics, as Foucault stresses, conceive their spiritual exercises as essential if individuals are to develop the virtues of good ethical agents. As Foucault puts it “The person who takes care of himself properly . . . will at the same time know how to fulfil his duties as part of the human community” (1995: 197).
For the Stoics fulfilling our role as part of the human community requires that we can dispassionately perform our natural social duties. To impartially perform our natural duties, Stoics argue, we must not only know our duties, but we must free ourselves from the cognitive errors, or value errors that constitute the basis of our emotions, and that motivate us to pursue glory, power or wealth. The well-trained Stoic will not suffer from emotions like fear, grief or anger, which jeopardize their impartial performance of natural duties. Foucault shows, for example, that for Epictetus, complete sovereignty as a rational subject may in fact require and make it possible to “observe the order of natural and acquired relationships: those of son, brother, citizen, wife, neighbour, fellow-traveller, and subject and ruler” (Diss. 2.14.8; Foucault 1995: 197).
Foucault defends this claim by showing how Epictetus argues that the sovereign, rational self will both know what his natural duties to others are as a communal being and will also be able to exercise these duties because he is untroubled by the passions that lead him/her astray from rational judgments (Foucault 2005: 195–8). Parents who suffer distress at the sight of their sick child’s suffering, Epictetus claims, will be incapable of performing their parental duties, whereas the father who exercises Stoic self-cultivation will perform his paternal duties undisturbed by the emotional tumult of fear (Diss. 1.II). Likewise, Seneca argues that Stoics who tranquilly affirm death will be able to perform their civic duties, including, for example, sacrificing themselves for their patria, while fearful citizens will abandon their natural civic duties (Ep. 36). Similarly, he argues that Stoics who judge slights and injuries as matters of indifference will be able to perform their natural civic duties, while angry leaders and citizens will exercise vengeance rather than respect natural law. Foucault notes in passing, the Stoic ethics of anger is located “precisely at the point of connection of self-control and command over others, of government of oneself and government of others” (2005: 374).5 Roman Stoics conceived the elimination of anger as a necessary condition of rational political leadership and inter-citizen relationships, and as a necessary political management of angry rulers and angry citizens. As Harris explains, “We can hardly doubt that the early Stoics, already saw that the elimination of orgē had political advantages. . . . But it was left to Seneca and Epictetus . . . to bring out the political benefits of this particular Stoic doctrine” (2001: 197). We might say then that the Roman Stoics conceived the care of the self as a necessary condition of civic life, insofar as it can protect the community from the violence of honor-fuelled orgē. However, specifying Stoicism as a political therapy of the passions in this way doesn’t give any greater traction to Foucault’s case that neo-Stoic practices might form the basis of meaningful contemporary political resistance.
We can therefore legitimately acknowledge Stoic practices of the self or “spiritual exercises” as useful for a range of ethical and political purposes, perhaps most noticeably as therapies that aim to cultivate the virtue of constancy or self-command necessary to impartially or “stoically” perform our natural social duties. It is precisely for this reason that early modern thinkers like Justus Lipsius reconfigured versions of the Stoic practices to cultivate virtuous citizens. As Veyne observes of Roman Stoicism, “We must not forget that ‘doing politics’ did not mean having principles and an opinion about politics or being an activist, as it does to us, but simply ‘take part in the public functions of the city, the duty of every free man” (2003: 142). Foucault is right then that Stoic practices aim to cultivate citizens who can fulfill their natural social duties, but they by no means foster individuals willing and able to engage in agonistic competitions for power, glory, or distinction.
One obvious reason Stoicism is necessarily incompatible with this type of political resistance is that it conceives power as belonging among the indifferents when compared to virtue. Stoics aim to extirpate the passions that they claim derive from valuing external goods like power, wealth, and honor. Stoic ethics therefore aims to cultivate virtue, conceived as perfect self-sufficiency, not the desire to exercise power. Stoic practices do not aim to expand the margins of freedom so that individuals can engage in open-ended games of power, but to establish a self-mastery that enables stoics to perform their natural social duties. We can therefore under stand Roman Stoicism’s care of self as a political therapy that aims to extirpate the passions that it claims (rightly or wrongly) undermine civic virtue. Stoic or neo-Stoic self-mastery does not entail or promote exercising or seeking to exercise power over others.
Indeed, Stoic self-cultivation not only works directly against Foucault’s revaluation of political power, and its definition of freedom as the liberty to exercise power over others in an open-ended network of power relations, it also fails to challenge political domination. We can see why this is the case by examining some examples of how Roman Stoics refracted their political actions and judgments through the principle of the care of the self. How does Stoic self-cultivation shape the stoic’s political response to domination or tyranny?
For the Stoic states of domination do not in any way threaten individual virtue. Stoics judge the tyrant’s exercise of power over their “external” goods, including political freedom, material possessions, even their life, as indifferent in contrast with their own sovereign reason. Stoic ethics seeks to transform individuals’ judgment such that they can tranquilly accept conditions of domination. It does so by conceiving everything other than reason or virtue as a matter of indifference. Under conditions of domination or tyranny, Stoics remain unperturbed; their “resistance” consists in safeguarding their personal integrity, not in challenging domination.
Seneca, for example, analyzes and illustrates how the Stoic care of the self regulates its response to political domination. Seneca’s case suggests that if Stoic virtue is the principle governing citizens’ relationship to things, events, and the world, it necessarily mitigates against challenging tyranny. Seneca’s articulation of the ethics-politics intersection shows that by making the principle of sovereignty or self-sufficiency the regulating component of political action Hellenistic ethics necessarily (a) gives priority to this inner freedom over political action that challenges political domination and (b) eschews resistance to political tyranny for the sake of maintaining inner purity or sovereignty.
In the Letters, for example, Seneca highlights the independence and priority of self-mastery over political freedom. Seneca advises Lucilius that for the sovereign self, losing political freedom, indeed losing any external goods, ought to be a matter of indifference:
Stilbo after his country was captured and his children and his wife lost, as he emerged from the general desolation alone and yet happy spoke as follows to Demetrius, called the Sacker of Cities . . . in answer to the question whether he had lost anything: “I have all my goods with me!” There is a brave and stout-hearted man for you! Yes, he forced Demetrius to wonder whether he himself had conquered after all. “My goods are all with me!” In other words, he deemed nothing that might be taken from him to be a good. (Ep. 9.18-19)
In On Anger, Seneca analyzes the right Stoic response for individuals who suffer extreme domination at the hands of a political tyrant, taking the two similar cases of King Cambyses with Praexaspses and the Persian King with Harpagus. Praexaspses and Harpagus both mildly insult their King and in retaliation this tyrant murders their children in front of them. In such extreme cases of tyranny, Seneca indicates that it may be impossible to maintain equanimity or sovereignty, but rather than angrily resisting injustice, which necessarily entails losing oneself in the passion of anger, he advises the victim of injustice to take another course that does not jeopardize his sovereignty:
To the man whose fortune it is to have a king who aims his arrows at the breasts of friends, and to the man whose ruler stuffs fathers with the guts of their children, I shall say: “Why are you moaning, madman? Why do you wait for some enemy to avenge you by the destruction of your nation, or a powerful king to fly to your rescue from a distance? Wherever you look, there is an end to your troubles. Do you see that precipice? That way you can descend to liberty. Do you see that sea, that river, that well? Liberty sits there in the depths. . . . They are escape routes from slavery. Are the exits I show you too difficult, requiring too much courage and strength? Do you ask what is the straight road to liberty? Any vein in your body.” (De Ira. 3.15)
Stoic freedom consists in preserving the sovereignty of one’s reason or judgment, and the Stoic makes suicide the final point of resistance against political tyranny that threatens this sovereignty.6 Under conditions of political tyranny, suicide is the ultimate road to such freedom.7 In Isaiah Berlin’s words, the “logical culmination of the process of destroying everything through which I can possibly be wounded is suicide” (1969: 164). As Veyne suggests, Seneca’s defence of suicide as an act of liberty
reveals Stoicism’s profoundest truth, which is to see life from death’s point of view and to make its followers live as though dead. Nothing is of significance but the disembedded self, just barely personal, whose existence can be snuffed out without disadvantage because this self is not waiting for anything . . . Jean-Marie Guyau . . . put it well: “Death, release from tension, the endless, aimless toil that is life, this is Stoicism’s final word” (2003: 114).
In the words of the Delphic oracle, Stoicism requires citizens to “take on the colour of the dead” (Laertius 1925: 7.1).
To conclude, then, if the Roman Stoic care of the self entails any type of political action, it is only insofar as it cultivates a form of self-sufficiency that may make it possible for citizens to dispassionately perform their natural and civic duties. It does not value or facilitate the kind of agonistic political freedom that Foucault champions in opposition to freedom conceived as negative liberty or communicative action. It cultivates virtuous behavior on the part of citizens and officials rather than any broader sense of citizenship as engaged, sometimes critically and transformatively directed public action.
Notes
1 On Arendt and Foucault’s different shadings of “biopolitics,” see Dolan (2005) and Blencowe (2010).
2 On earlier Greek Stoicism’s political theory, see Schofield (1999).
3 Foucault makes this claim about the desirability of reconfiguring ancient practices of the self at the heart of The Hermeneutics of the Subject 1981–2 lecture series. In these lectures, he primarily elaborates the late Roman Stoics’ practices of the care of the self (see Elden 2016: 154).
4 Despite Foucault’s skepticism about the possibility and desirability of realizing “communicative power,” Allen argues that it potentially complements rather than contradicts his strategic conception of power (Allen 2002). Foucault himself identifies the Arendtian communicative conception of power as “utopian” in the pejorative sense of the word, that is, he treats it as symptomatic of “a failure to see that power relations are not something bad in in itself, [something] that we have to break free of” (1996: 446).
5 Yet remarkably in the context of a study aimed at exploring the political significance of the Hellenistic model of conversion, Foucault makes almost no references to Seneca’s On Mercy (55–56 CE) or On Anger (41 CE), one written as advice on leadership to the emperor Nero, the other as advice to his brother the Roman senator Novatus. It is noteworthy that Foucault does not analyze On Anger in particular because it elucidates how the Stoic should refract his political judgments and actions through the principle of the care of the self.
6 On the controversy over the Stoic and Senecan defence of suicide, see Rist (1969) Griffin (1986) and Englert (1990).
7 Lodge’s frontispiece for his 1620 translation of Seneca’s moral works visually represents Stoic constancy in the face of tyranny. Skinner observes of Lodge’s engraving “Stoic constancy is shown to triumph over tyranny only through a willingness to embrace death” (2018: 227).
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