Content area
Full Text
Hum Stud (2014) 37:489504
DOI 10.1007/s10746-014-9331-3
THEORETICAL / PHILOSOPHICAL PAPER
Richard White
Published online: 17 September 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
Abstract In this paper, I examine Foucaults ideas concerning the care of the self. What exactly is this ideal that Foucault describes in his last two books? Do these books represent a break or a continuation with the earlier writings on knowledge and power? Most important, I consider whether the care of the self could ever be a signicant ethical ideal given some of the objections that have been raised against Foucaults position. I also look at the care of the self as the focus of Foucaults own views on spiritual life. I argue that Foucaults later work offers the basis for a secular or non-theistic spirituality which is especially relevant today.
Keywords Foucault care of the self Ethics Spirituality
Michel Foucault opens new perspectives on the practices of surveillance and normalization that increasingly organize our lives. By casting light on the operations of power/knowledge which are usually kept hidden, Foucault also liberates us from the ordinary narratives concerning reason and human progress which once held the status of established truths. In, Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality: Volume One, Foucault speaks out for the dispossessed of historythe mad, the criminal, and the deviantand he elaborates the ways in which we are produced and organized as docile bodies, or responsible subjects, in the prison house of modern society. Foucaults writing is both powerful and subversive; and by making us aware of the genealogy of truth, he creates a space in which life is no longer encumbered by the meanings it had previously acquired.
At the same time, Foucault remains cautious about the possibility of human liberation. In The History of Sexuality: Volume One, for example, he seems to challenge the idea that human liberationin this case sexual liberationis even
R. White (&)
Department of Philosophy, Creighton University, Omaha, NE, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Foucault on the Care of the Self as an Ethical Project and a Spiritual Goal
123
490 R. White
possible, if it is only a reversal of perspectives that remains within the orbit of what it seeks to escape from. Witness the case of Walter, the...