The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon
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of initude,” or those various modes of modern thought that understand man to be irreducibly transcendental and empirical.
The second paradox or double that marks the modern understanding of man is the double of the cogito and the unthought. This paradox is the consequence of the phenomenological method, where self-relection is taken to be the paradigmatic means of philosophical investigation. The doubling of the cogito and the unthought relates to the paradox that whatever is thought by the subject is conditioned by the unthought. Stated differently, self-relection is the means by which what is thought is illuminated, but the subject itself is constituted by the unthought. In contradistinction to the self-transparency that marked the Cartesian cogito, Foucault claims that the modern cogito lacks this transparency and clarity. Foucault’s analysis of this second doublet echoes the paradox of the empirical and the transcendental just outlined; it concerns the fact that the modern cogito is conditioned by the unthought such that all attempts at self-knowledge are necessarily blurred and marked by regions of opacity. In the modern episteme, what is thought is conditioned by what is unthought, and so the immediacy and transparency of the Cartesian cogito give way to a modern cogito whose attempts at self-knowledge can only be partial, encumbered by blind spots.
The third and inal double relates to the relationship between historicity and subjectivity in the modern episteme; this double concerns the return and retreat of the origin. In his discussions of the origin, Foucault references the fact that man is marked and determined by a history that is not transparent to him, even as he is charged with rendering this history intelligible; hence man is the product and origin of history at once. The structure by this point is familiar: man serves as the transcendental grounds for a discourse that in part determines him, and for this reason the phenomenological evidence given in self-relection is distorted and imperfect. Although phenomenology is not marked by the conceit of self-certainty to the degree that Cartesian philosophy is – indeed, one of the basic tenets of phenomenology is that a “view from nowhere” is untenable, as we ind ourselves always already implicated in those very discourses through which we examine ourselves – it remains the case that Foucault takes the paradoxical doubles that mark the modern discourse on man to be an indictment of phenomenology’s critical aspirations in no uncertain terms.
Foucault’s discussion of the three doubles serves not only as an indictment of phenomenology’s ability to proceed as a critical project but also as an indictment of the ability of modern thought to formulate an ethics: “For modern thought, no morality is possible. Thought has already left itself in its own being as early as the nineteenth century; it is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate and enslave” (EOT, 328). The attribution of action to thought and the notion that all thought is always already practical are ideas that have marked contemporary
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philosophy in ways that are dificult to overstate. The legacy of Foucault’s discussion of the double, then, lies not only in its indictment of phenomenology as a critical project but in its recognition that, in the modern episteme, thought is violent, “a perilous act,” by virtue of the fact that thought does not approach the world with innocence but with deep complicity.
Ann V. Murphy
See Also
Ethics
Man
Phenomenology
Structuralism
Suggested Reading
Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gutting, Gary. 1989. Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientiic Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Oksala, Johanna. 2005. Foucault on Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Foucault’s work always had an ethical impetus in his outrage over “intolerable” contemporary institutions or practices. His histories were designed to trace the genealogical origins of, for example, the treatment of insanity as
“mental illness,” the punishment of criminals by imprisonment, and the movement to “liberate” sexual behavior through self-understanding. As members of an enlightened modern society, we see no scientiically or ethically acceptable alternatives to these approaches to madness, crime, and sexuality. But Foucault’s histories set out to show how they arose from intellectually and morally dubious conceptions that are by no means inevitable. The idea is to provide historical tools for those opposing an intolerable aspect of modern social life.
In every case, Foucault’s ethical objection to modern practices seems to have been broadly existentialist: they make people be something they have not chosen for themselves. But he rejected any comprehensive philosophical account supporting this moral stance and simply began from his intense pre-philosophical conviction that the practices were morally intolerable. The issue of an ethics in any philosophical sense was not a meaningful option as Foucault analyzed the intertwined structures of knowledge and power underlying modern social practices.
This, however, began to change when Foucault’s historical study of modern sexuality made explicit the central role of the subject or self in the network of social constraints. It was, in particular, now apparent that constraints on our behavior were not only externally imposed (e.g., by coninement in an asylum or a prison); they were also internalized as our own view of our self-identity (e.g., my “liberating” acceptance of my sexual identity). As a result, in the irst volume of The History of Sexuality (EHS1) (intended as an introductory overview of four further projected volumes on children, women, “perverts,” and couples), Foucault highlighted the role of the individual subject (self) for the understanding of modern sexuality.
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Extending his studies to the self led, however, to a corresponding extension of the historical scope of Foucault’s studies. Although previously he had been able to restrict himself to the broadly modern period (with brief looks at the Renaissance), he now decided that he could not understand the modern self without relating it to the medieval Christian view of the self. This Foucault undertook in a study of medieval sexuality (Les aveux de la chair), but, before it was properly inished, he decided that he could understand the medieval stance only by contrasting it with the ancient Greek and Roman history that had preceded it. This led to two volumes on Greek and Roman sexuality, published in 1984. Since this was the year of Foucault’s death, the volume on medieval sexuality, in accord with Foucault’s dictate of “no posthumous publications,” has not appeared.
Foucault’s two books on ancient sexuality appeared as the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality (EHS2 and EHS3), even though they did not carry out any part of the history of modern sexuality projected by the introductory irst volume. It is not just that the move to Greece and Rome broadened Foucault’s historical scope; it also led to a new conception of his topic. His original project, previewed in volume one, was to tell in detail the story of how individual subjects internalized the normalizing structures of society’s power/knowledge nexus. But Foucault found in the ancients the possibility of a meaningful construction of the self, which involved not just internalizing external norms or resisting them through counterpower. Rather, it meant the possibility of forging, within the interstices left by social constraints, an autonomous self-identity, a project that could, even in a traditional sense, be called ethical.
Readers of Foucault’s previous histories might well wonder how his picture of individuals formed by the social power/knowledge nexus can allow room for any project of ethical self-formation. The answer lies in his (implicit) move from a focus on marginalization to a focus on problematization (“Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations” [interview with Paul Rabinow, 1984], EEW1, 111–119). Marginalization occurs when the constraints of the power/knowledge network are so strong as to threaten a group of individuals with total loss of identity, allowing them no meaningful place in the society (e.g., the mad, the criminal, the sexually “perverse”). Here there is a choice only between submitting to normalization (and losing self-identity) and asserting self-identity entirely through opposition to the constraining society. All of Foucault’s earlier histories (except for The Order of Things, which has at best very indirect social signiicance) concern marginalized groups.
“Problematization,” by contrast, is Foucault’s term for a set of fundamental issues and choices confronting “mainline” (nonmarginalized) members of a society. Talk of problematization assumes a preliminary deinition of a person in terms of social constraints, but in this case (as opposed to marginalization) the constraints allow room for creative self-development in accord with self-chosen goals and standards. Problematization differs from marginalization because problematized individuals
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are not, by virtue of objective features over which they have no control, subject to an almost total constriction of their choices as is the case for marginalized groups. As opposed to the marginalized, those whose lives are merely problematized have a “social essence” compatible with a signiicant range of freedom. In the history of ancient sexuality, problematization implicitly replaces marginalization as the focus of the discussion.
Although Foucault’s ethical emphasis is on an individual’s construction of a self (an identity), he does recognize the role of ethical codes (rules of behavior), the force of which will vary depending on the manner in which a given individual is “subjected” to it. Although Foucault says little about ethical codes, it is reasonable to suppose that he would see them as general frameworks required for life within a given social structure but not necessarily the central concern of ethical life, which is instead the construction of a self.
This construction involves four elements (which Foucault calls the four “modes of subjectiication”) that characterize an individual’s relations to an ethical code (EHS2, Chapter 3 of the Introduction). The irst mode is ethical substance: the various aspects of life relevant to ethical behavior (in the case of sexual ethics, these would be desires, pleasures, actions, virtues, etc.). Second is the mode of subjection (to be distinguished from subjectiication), the sense in which an individual is subject to the ethical code (some possibilities are the rigid following of highly speciied rules, inspiration by highly general principles, or dialectical reasoning to reconcile principles in tension with one another). Third, the forms of elaboration are speciic kinds of activity that lead to an acceptance of the ethical code (for example, rigorous training through negative reinforcement, prolonged meditation on paradigm instances found in sacred texts, or imitation of admired mentors). Finally, the telos (end) is the ultimate goal posited as the purpose of morality (e.g., social stability, individual enlightenment, control of the passions, or eternal happiness).
Like moral codes themselves, the modes of subjectiication that relate individuals to the codes of their societies are not the free creation of individuals. But, in contrast to the code, a given mode of subjectiication allows a signiicant range of choice for some individuals. A particular mode will typically offer alternatives (celibate vs. married life) for its implementation, and any alternative will be underdetermined as to its speciic form (e.g., active vs. contemplative religious orders). This allows for individual choice in self-formation, based, for example, on personal standards of aesthetic value, corresponding to what Foucault calls an aesthetics of existence (which will be discussed further).
Based on the schema of the four modes of subjectiication, Foucault offers case studies of the ancients’ problematizations of sexual ethics. These studies are essentially archaeological, looking at the underlying conceptual structures of the ethical thought of the ancient world – irst that of the fourth-century Greeks, then that of the Latin and Greek world around the time of Christ. A constant benchmark
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is the contrast with Christian ethics, which Foucault sees as emerging in the later ancient period from non-Christian sources. The ethical substance of ancient sexual behavior comprises desires, acts, and pleasures (ta aphrodisia) viewed as natural goods, though subject to some dangers and concerns (primarily because of their ties to our lower, animal nature and their exceptional intensity). By contrast, Christians, according to Foucault, see sex as in itself intrinsically evil. As a result, the ancients’ mode of subjection to the ethical code regarding sexual behavior is the careful use (chresis) of pleasures, in contrast to the Christians’ denial (austerity), effected either through complete celibacy or through restriction of sexuality to monogamous marriage, directed to procreation.
As to the forms of elaboration, the ancients emphasized self-mastery (enkratia), achieved through training (askesis) in self-control. We achieve conformity to the sexual code through exercises designed to make reason the master of our desires and feelings. By contrast, for Christians, this internal battle between reason and passion is replaced by a struggle between the self’s desire to maintain ultimate control of itself and the imperative for it to yield to God, in whom alone it can ind its true identity and happiness. As a result, the telos radically changes from the ancient to the Christian world. For the ancients, the telos is moderation (sophrosyne), achieved through the proper use of pleasures to attain the ideal of human freedom in both its negative and positive forms (freedom from domination by passions, freedom for rational mastery of self and others). For the Christians, the telos is total subjection of self to God – the negative freedom of denial of self for the sake of a positive freedom achieved only by living entirely in and through God.
What is the point of Foucault’s excursions into the ancient history of sexual ethics? The point is not, as in his previous histories, a genealogy of our current practices that will show their contingent, dubious origins and provide ammunition for attacks on their privileged position. The ancient world is too far removed from ours for such a history to sustain suficient connection to contemporary concerns; it cannot be what Foucault called a “history of the present.” But Foucault thinks he can ind in the ancient world a model for an ethics of self-creation that will be relatively independent of the power/knowledge structures of our society. This is by no means a matter of “going back to the Greeks” and reviving their way of ethical life. Apart from the historical impossibility of doing such a thing, there are many central features of their ethics that we would not want to emulate (e.g., their focus on the value – literally phallocentric – of virility, their disdain for women, their acceptance of slavery) (“On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” [interview with Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow], EEW1, 256–257).
But Foucault does think we can proitably adapt the ancients’ general notion of an ethics based on an aesthetics of existence. An aesthetics of existence is a techne, a practical method of ethical formation devoted not (like Christianity) to redeeming the self (saving it from Hell and for Heaven) but to creating a beautiful life on Earth
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(EEW1, 260). Such an aesthetics derives from an individual’s distinctive taste, so that the ethical formation it guides allows for an existence that avoids the full force of social power structures by inding a location within the interstices of these structures where the individual as such can lourish. As we have noted, such a project of selfformation is not available to the marginalized people on whom society imposes an identity. For them, the only choices are submission or resistance. But for those with suficient status in a society, there are resources for creative self-formation within the social fabric.
An aesthetics of existence has, as Foucault sees it, a signiicant advantage because it makes ethics an essentially private enterprise rather than the imposition of public (universally binding) rules for how we should live. He acknowledges that we need a minimal universal ethical code to maintain a stable social context for our lives. But this is little except the core injunctions that humans have endorsed for millennia. The remainder of ethical life is a matter for private choice, with in particular no role for public moralities derived from allegedly scientiic sources such as sociobiology or psychoanalysis. This privatization provides an alternative to the normalizing characteristic of modern society, since it replaces universal (“scientiically” underwritten) standards of moral perfection with personalized ideals of a “beautiful life” (EEW1, 254). This allows a separate space in which ethics can be practiced in relative independence of “the great political and social and economic structures” (EEW1, 261). This does not mean, however, that an aesthetics of existence cannot include a concern – lacking in ancient Greece – for the marginalized of one’s society. Activism on their behalf can be, as it was for Foucault, an integral part of creating a beautiful life.
Foucault’s ethics obviously has little to do with the traditional efforts of philosophers to formulate the norms of ethical codes or with the metanormative concerns of analytic philosophers. Nothing he says rejects these projects, but he inds the ethical center of gravity elsewhere, in the private sphere of aesthetic selfformation. A natural objection is that such a self-centered project should hardly be called ethical. It is, however, ethical in its concern with the fundamental values that guide an individual’s life. The worry, presumably, is that, since these values concern self-formation, they lack the directedness to others characteristic of ethics. But to this Foucault would have two responses. First, there is a moral code that constrains self-formative behavior that would harm others. Second, given that there is no harm to others, it would seem that perfecting oneself is an essential aspect of a good human life. It might be suggested that the perfection in question is tied only to individual preferences (taste) and so lacks the universal quality of ethical goods. But to this Foucault can plausibly reply that, in his view, it is a universal human good that each individual engage in a project of aesthetic self-creation. This, indeed, is Foucault’s ethical reason for supporting the struggles of marginalized people.
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Another question is whether Foucault’s turn to ethics reverses his earlier rejection of philosophy as a study of the subject. It is true that his histories of ancient sexuality work along not just his previous two axes of knowledge (archaeology) and power (genealogy). They add an axis of the individual ethical subject, which “constitutes” itself in the context of the irst two axes. But, of course, merely bringing into the discussion the individuals who are the subjects of knowledge and power hardly requires philosophical assumptions about subjectivity. Nor need Foucault’s use of terms such as “freedom” and “relection” be read as committing him to a transcendentalist philosophy. The terms may readily be understood as referring to everyday features of human life (the metaphysical equivalent to Freud’s famous reminder that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar). In their everyday sense, freedom and relection do not imply Kantian (or Sartrean) autonomy. They may, for example, represent the small spark of subjectivity in a context heavily constrained by the social system of power-knowledge. In his books on ancient sexuality, Foucault of course often uses Platonic vocabulary, which smacks of strong autonomy. Moreover, since the powerknowledge constraints of ancient Greece and Rome are no longer relevant to us, he has little to say about them. He is simply looking for modes of thinking about the self (e.g., in terms of an aesthetics of existence) that might suggest strategies in our struggle with modern disciplinary society. None of this provides grounds for concluding that Foucault has lapsed into transcendentalism.
Foucault’s account of ethical subjectiication does recall Levinas’s account of how the encounter with the Other constitutes the I as a subject. But Foucault’s “subject” already exists at the center of a world of objects prior to the encounter with the Other. In contrast to Levinas’s subject, Foucault’s is not constituted tout court by the encounter with ethical demands. It is merely constituted as an ethical subject; that is, it develops (partly by its own decisions) distinctive modes of being “subject to” the ethical code. This is an event that occurs within the world of subjects and objects, not one that constitutes this world. Foucault’s ethics does not provide necessary conditions for anything other than ethical life itself.
More generally, Foucault’s ethics is not a contribution to philosophy in the sense that has deined the discipline since at least Kant and Hegel: as a body of theoretical knowledge about fundamental human questions. He had no such theoretical conclusions to offer us, just ethical and political commitments to the kind of life he wanted to live. This was a life of continual free self-transformation, unhindered by unnecessary conceptual and social constraints. His intellectual enterprise was the critique of disciplines and practices that restrict our freedom to transform ourselves. He did not object to those who continued to build new theoretical structures, and, in some cases, such as Deleuze, he seemed to endorse their results. But he was not really a philosopher in the modern sense. Of course, Foucault’s books, like other classics of intellectual history, exhibit enormous philosophical talent and are often of great interest to philosophers. Moreover, as his inal work makes clear, although
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he did not pursue philosophical truth, he did aspire to lead, in the ancient sense, a philosophical life.
Gary Gutting
See Also
Christianity
Problematization
Self
Sex
Subjectiication
The Ancients (Stoics and Cynics)
Suggested Reading
Bernauer, James, and Michael Mahon. 2005. “Foucault’s Ethical Imagination,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 149–175.
Davidson, Arnold. 2005. “Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd ed., ed. Gary Gutting. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 123–148.
Detel, Wolfgang. 2005. Foucault and Classical Antiquity: Power, Ethics and Knowledge, trans. David
Wigg-Wolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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The concept of “event” plays a central role in Foucault’s thinking concerning history and historical methodology, and thus in his archaeological and genealogical methods. Historical events in Foucault’s thought are not
merely those happenings that would conventionally be labeled “events” – noteworthy occurrences such as the beginning of a war, an election, a death – but rather are more subtle, pervasive, multiple, and diverse shifts that underlie these incidents. With his reconceptualization of the event, Foucault sets his own theoretical practice in contrast to traditional historical practice: it is a counterpractice, speciically a resistance to the governing presuppositions concerning history’s continuous teleological development, the unity of the knowing subject, the objectivity of historical analysis conducted by that subject, and the ixity of stable categories of analysis.
Foucault’s 1971 essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” elaborates this oppositional relationship by contrasting “effective history” with traditional history. The paired terms – Herkunft, descent, and Entstehung, emergence – used by Nietzsche to refer to the genealogical investigation of “origins” summarize the approach that deines effective history and the signiicance of the event in that approach. An analysis of Herkunft enables one to go beneath the noticeable happenings of history, the transparently important concepts throughout the history of ideas, and the supposed unities of author and corpus to discern “the myriad events through which – thanks to which, against which – they were formed” (ELCP, 146). Thus, events are formative of what we perceive to be necessary and obvious. The constitutive operation of events, however, is not necessarily a uniform, predetermined, coordinated, or orderly one. In mapping dispersed events in order to give an account of the descent of those things that have been considered given, the “things that continue to exist and have value for us,” one enters into the realm of accidents, errors, chance, and divergence (ibid.).
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