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Angelaki
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Michel Foucault's guide to living

Todd May
a a

Department of Philosophy & Religion, Clemson University, 126D Hardin Hall Clemson, SC 29634, USA E-mail: mayt@clemson.edu Available online: 16 Jan 2007

To cite this article: Todd May (2006): Michel Foucault's guide to living, Angelaki, 11:3, 173-184 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09697250601048630

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ANGEL AK I
journal of the theoretical humanities volume 11 number 3 december 2006

hat remains to us now as philosophers? What remains to us of our thought and, in particular, our lives? What is it today to live a philosophical life? We have seen, since the most recent of those heady days in which philosophy and its critical thought seemed to matter, the 1960s and 1970s, a steady decline in impact of philosophical thought. It has been a long time since Marcuses One Dimensional Man was required reading for those here in the US who would dare to articulate a vision for society, or even those who wanted to engage meaningfully in debate about what such a vision would be. It has been a long time since prisoners in France read Discipline and Punish and saw their lives in it. It has been a long time since the word relevance meant relevant to our living, both with ourselves and with one another. So, what remains to us now as philosophers? Those of us in my generation, the generation that protested the Vietnam war, that experimented with new ways of living, that envisioned a society without discrimination or oppression, have largely moved on. We have moved on to stock options, to the Internet, to the golf course. We have populated the suburbs so that they now have more people than the cities that formed the site of our battles both for alterity and for equality. Along the way, we have failed to heed those young voices, recently arising, telling us of the dangers of globalization, speaking to us in words whose meanings we once understood. The events of September 2001, though they have thrown our nation back upon itself, will not alter this course. If the early evidence is any indication, those events will serve only to cement it. We will move forward, less critically than before, casting our lot with those who lead us, allowing them to tell us who we are. So, what remains to us as philosophers? What is it today to live a philosophical life? Are we to

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MICHEL FOUCAULTS GUIDE TO LIVING

move within the philosophical world as a banker moves among clients: gathering connections, forming networks, promoting our careers? Is our philosophy merely the coin of this particular realm? Or are we instead to become business ethicists, offering ethical guidance to a capitalism whose use for us is only to provide its veneer of humanity? Are we to form business ethics centers whose results fool only ourselves? Or are we, in another vein, to become the monks and hermits of the academic world, ceding our relevance to others, chewing upon our bitterness in the carapace of our offices? What remains to us now, to live and to become? What is it to be a philosopher in this time and place? There are many paths along which this question might lead. Here, I would like to discuss

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/06/030173^12 2006 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/09697250601048630

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only one. Please do not mistake it for the only one. In fact, if what I say here is right, then there are many ways to live philosophically in our age. What is required is not the following of a certain path but instead to wrest ourselves from the paths that are laid out for us, and the discovery of new ones with the help of philosophical works, making something of ourselves in the only interesting sense of the word making. In order to do that, I would like to read certain of the works of Michel Foucault, with which many readers will be familiar, in concert with and in contrast to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, particularly as those meditations are interpreted by the historian of ancient philosophy, Pierre Hadot. What I plan to say here is not difficult or abstract. I am not interested in extending the philosophical map to cover new corners of our thought, or in adding to the philosophical lexicon. I am interested not so much in our theories as in our lives, or better, I am interested in the place at which the two intersect. It is a philosophical life, or at least one of its paths, that concerns me here, and I will try, temptation aside, not to betray that concern as I move along. We are familiar, most of us, with Marcus Aureliuss Meditations, the notes of admonitions that, after his initial expressions of gratitude, open with the words, Begin the morning by saying to yourself, I shall meet the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsociable. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil.1 Throughout the Meditations, Aurelius exhorts the reader with Stoical advice: be just to your fellow human beings, recognize that everyone dies and few are remembered, change your attitude toward the world instead of expecting the world to change for you, neither fear nor favor the opinions of others. The themes of the Meditations are limited and the advice often repetitive. It can, in fact, read the wrong way, sound preachy and patronizing. How, then, do we read Aureliuss advice the right way? By recalling that the Meditations were not written to be read by others. They were Aureliuss notes to himself, written in the respites between battles, while he was away from Rome on military campaign.2 What Aurelius was doing in the Meditations was exhorting himself, reminding himself of the truths of Stoicism he needed to bear in mind in order to live a worthwhile existence. If we read the Meditations with that in mind, their entire tone is transformed. No longer do we hear the preacher berating us with our shortcomings, reminding us of the necessity of living right, offering us the same tired advice week in and week out. Instead, we find ourselves in the presence of a human being struggling with himself, seeking against the odds to hold himself to standards he fears are beyond him. Seen this way, the repetitive character of the Meditations is no longer distracting or patronizing; it becomes part of the poignancy of the notes. Aurelius does not live up. He recognizes this. Day after day, he must remind himself of those simple truths that he failed to follow, even though he had just brought them to mind the day before. You will soon die, he tells himself, and you are not yet simple, not free from perturbations, nor without suspicion of being hurt by external things, nor kindly disposed toward all; nor do you yet realize that acting justly is the only true wisdom.3 He does berate, but it is himself that he berates. He seeks to become something more than he is, and the Meditations is a record not only of that seeking but of its difficulty and of his perceived failure. Why is Aureliuss struggle so difficult? Why can he not just become the man he would like to be? Because the world and his character do not lend themselves to it. Aurelius lived, much as we live, in a world in which the denial of death, the accumulation of objects, the pandering after praise and recognition, constitute the given conditions of daily existence. He was sculpted by those conditions, and if he is to escape them, to rise above them, this will not happen through a single epiphany that will carry him through the rest of his years. It will happen, if it does, through continuous struggle against that which pulls him away from the truths he seeks to live by. Aurelius reminds himself of the precepts of Stoicism because the world does not, and because who the world has molded him to be is not oriented toward them.

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And so we arrive at what the French philosopher Pierre Hadot calls spiritual exercises. Hadot believes, not only of Aurelius but of many of the ancient schools of philosophy, that they were interested not in knowledge as the result of some sort of disinterested inquiry, but rather in a specific knowledge, the knowledge of how to live. [P]hilosophy, he writes, was a way of life, both in its exercise and effort to achieve wisdom, and in its goal, wisdom itself. For real wisdom does not merely cause us to know: it makes us be in a different way.4 But in order to be able to be in a different way one has to extricate oneself from the way one used to be, jettison ones habits and emotional responses and intellectual orientation. And that requires spiritual exercises, of which the Meditations provide Hadot with one of his central examples. For Hadot, spiritual exercises are the means by which one transforms oneself in order to rise to the way of life one seeks to live. By reminding oneself, often constantly, of the truths that undergird such a life, one keeps ones goal in view, one assesses ones emotions and thoughts to ensure that they are aligned with that goal; one alters ones reactions from those that have been instilled to those that are in keeping with a higher form of life. Aureliuss Meditations are just such a form of spiritual exercise, as also might be Senecas letters or Epicuruss principle doctrines or even some of Platos dialogues, and as well many exercises that have not been passed down through the written word. Much that is around us presses upon us, conspiring to lower our desires, to make us smaller, to engage us in pursuits that are ultimately both frustrating and unworthy. Spiritual exercises take us in the opposite direction, pulling against the mundane forces of the world and our inclinations, helping us attain in our lives a vision that is often grasped only in theory. Shortly, I will try to make the case that many of Michel Foucaults writings, especially those that run from Discipline and Punish through to the end of his life, should be seen as spiritual exercises, in many ways akin to Aureliuss Meditations, although in some important ways divergent as well. But before turning to that task, I would like to do two things. First, it is worth noting that Foucault himself discussed spiritual exercises. In his most extended discussion, the ` recently translated lectures from the College de France, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, he follows the development of the Stoic and Epicurean project of taking care of oneself as they contrast with Platos view of knowing oneself and the Christian view of self-annulment that followed them. In the course of these lectures, he focuses on spiritual exercises, and Aureliuss exercises in particular, delineating a spiritual exercise whose role and function will be precisely, on the one hand, always to keep in mind the things we must have in mind namely, the definition of the good, of freedom, and of reality and, at the same time as this exercise must always remind us of them and reactualize them for us, it must also enable us to link them together and thus define what, in terms of the subjects freedom, must be recognized by this freedom as good in the only element of reality that belongs to us, namely, the present.5 Although he does not apply this concept to his own works, I believe that Foucaults depiction of Hellenistic spiritual exercises has elements that characterize many of his own writings. However, and this is the second point, I would like to call attention at the outset to one central aspect of ancient spiritual exercises that does not find its way into Foucault. Hadot remarks that, By means of them [i.e., spiritual exercises] the individual raises himself up to the life of the objective Spirit; that is to say, he re-places himself within the perspective of the Whole.6 Central to the spiritual exercises of the ancient world, because central to the philosophies which give birth to those exercises, is a commitment to remove oneself from ones individual nature and see things from the perspective of the Whole, the cosmos. If one could so remove oneself, embracing the Whole rather than ones own socially reinforced goals and desires, the way would be open to peace and tranquility, and ultimately to wisdom. Michel Foucault, of course, has no room in his philosophy for a grasp of the Whole. Not surprisingly, then, the ideas of peace and tranquility do not appear in his perspective either. For Foucault, spiritual exercises go in

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another direction, one more in accordance both with the contemporary world and with his own philosophical and political orientation. As an initial approach to this distinction between Foucaults spiritual exercises and those of, say, Aurelius, let me say that while the spiritual exercises of the ancient world are more nearly ethical in character, the spiritual exercises Foucaults work engages in is more nearly aesthetic. When I use the term ethical to characterize ancient spiritual exercises and the common perspective from which they arose, I mean to point to the idea that there is an underlying assumption among many of the ancients that there is a right way to live, or a small set of right ways, and that spiritual exercises are one of the primary means by which to orient oneself toward that right way. Although there is, of course, disagreement regarding which way is the right way to live among Platonists, Aristoteleans, Stoics, Epicureans, and others, there remains a common commitment to the principle that there is one. In fact, it is that common commitment that allows there to be disagreement. Without it, the doctrines are no more than suggestions and paths to mutually compatible goals. I should note here that the ancient claim that there is a right way to live should not be read with the moral overtones associated with modern moral philosophy. The ancients assumed that everyone wanted to live well. For instance, there is Socrates famous commitment to the idea that to know the good is to do the good, and for Aristotle there was a telos for human beings as for all other things. Thus, the ethical character of ancient writing is not directed toward imposing a set of moral requirements upon a more or less willing subject, but of pointing the direction for proper living to a being that is already oriented toward receiving it. Foucault, convergent with the movement of much of the contemporary period, does not share that ancient commitment, and, as a result, he does not care to engage in argument about what the right way to live is. Although there are, as I have argued elsewhere, moral or ethical standards implicit in his work,7 these standards do not consist in embracing one type of life or another as superior to others. In fact, much of his thought moves against that idea. There is no concept of the good, of freedom, and of reality in Foucault that corresponds to what he finds at the basis of ancient spiritual exercises. In a criticism of Foucaults interpretation of the Hellenistic philosophy, Hadot writes that, Foucault is propounding a culture of the self which is too aesthetic.8 Whether such a criticism is apposite as a matter of Foucaults interpretation of the ancients is beyond my expertise to judge. I believe, however, that Hadot is right to see an aesthetic undercurrent in Foucaults own orientation, although its existence worries me less than it does Hadot. As Foucault himself once remarked:
in our society art has become something which is related only to objects, and not to individuals, or to life. But couldnt everyones life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not life?9

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In rejecting the general idea that there are standards for the right way to live and the more specific ancient idea that those standards involve, among other things, an attempt to remove oneself from ones individual orientation in order to see things from the perspective of the Whole, Foucaults works transform the question to which much of ancient philosophy seeks to provide an answer. The question he wrestles with is not, How ought I to live? It is, instead, How might I live? Throughout the Meditations, Aurelius struggles to meet the standard for living he can see before him; the Meditations are his spiritual exercises, his means, for trying to rise to that standard. Stoic philosophy has answered the question of how he ought to live; now he needs to mold himself into someone worthy of that standard. For Foucault, the question and the struggle are in many ways different. In a passage from the second volume of his history of sexuality, a passage many of you will be familiar with, Foucault writes:
As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of some people it

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might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting on with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knowers straying afield of himself?10

In this passage, I would like to see the intertwining of both a convergence with and a divergence from Aurelius. Foucaults lines regarding the rejection of knowledgeableness and his desire to get free of himself could surely have been lifted from the Meditations themselves. Knowledge must be bound to ones living if it is to be worth pursuing, and it must free one from ones given individual character. On the other hand, for Aurelius, the object of that knowledge, and of his attempt to keep that object always before his eyes, is to rise to the standard of the Whole that Stoicism has set. For Foucault, in contrast, it is, as he says, in straying afield of himself. Freedoms task is not that of hewing to principles that tell one how one ought to live, but of seeking to create a life, something perhaps new and different, something that would be worthy of being lived. This is the distinction I have tried to mark with the words ethical and aesthetic. If Foucault seeks in his writings to get free of himself, then we are faced with three questions. First, what is it that he seeks to free himself from; second, what does he seek to free himself for; and finally, in what ways are his writings supposed to assist him, and by extension, how might they assist us? Regarding the first question, there are many ways to answer it. Scholars of Foucaults work have focused on different aspects of his thought to bring out different central themes; but if we look especially to Discipline and Punish and the first volume of History of Sexuality which are the two works that address that question most directly we can probably agree that the political practices he struggles most forcefully against converge on what he sometimes called normalization. I want to recall how the struggle against normalization appears in these

works, since it displays both the kinship and the distance between Foucault and Aurelius. The broad lines of critique in Discipline and Punish are probably familiar to most readers of this essay. Questioning the commonly held view that the evolution of carceral practices from torture to rehabilitation is an unqualified good, Foucault tries to show that the rise of rehabilitation has in fact bound us both the incarcerated and the rest of us more deeply and more decisively than the admittedly barbarous practices it replaced. Rehabilitation, a project that is inseparable from the rise of psychological sciences, acted in concert with similar practices in other domains (schools, the military, factories) in order to ensure that peoples behavior would be shaped into acceptable forms, forms that coincided with the needs of emerging capitalist society. The rise of discipline this convergence of psychological science and the domains in which it was being both developed and practiced transformed the relationship between authority and behavior. Previous to this rise, behavior could be divided into two categories: the permitted and the forbidden. What was forbidden was punished mercilessly; what was permitted was left alone. The relationship between behavior and authority, then, was binary. When discipline replaces punishment and torture, however, a more wide open field for intervention develops. We might conceive the view of behavior in the regime of discipline as constituted by an ideal point, which could be called the normal, and all actual human behavior arrayed at some distance in any direction away from that ideal point. Nobody actually exists at the ideal point. Everyone is at some distance from it, at least in their desires if not in their actions. And, since nobody is actually normal, everyone can be made more normal by the intervention of some psychological service. Foucault writes that when one wishes to individualize the healthy, normal and law-abiding adult, it is always by asking him how much of the child he has in him, what secret madness lies within him, what fundamental crime he has dreamed of committing.11 These services are not reducible to the state, as was the case with the authority over

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behavior during the regime of torture and punishment, but they work in some degree of concert to produce the phenomenon of normalization. Normalization, then, is the resonance of a variety of overlapping practices and knowledges that converge to surveil, to intervene, to question, to prod, to investigate, and to watch over human beings, turning them into the modern subjects with which we are familiar today, because we are those subjects. It is, of course, not only the rehabilitative practices that have created us to be so. The evolution of sexual practices has also contributed to the project of normalization, although from a different angle. As emblematic of that contribution, Foucault traces the change in the nature of the Catholic confessional over the course of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from a confessional of acts to a confessional of desires. It was no longer an adequate confession to reveal those forbidden sexual acts in which one had engaged. Now, one had to reveal those acts one desired to perform, and those which one did not engage in but would have liked to, and those which one considered, and those which one thought about.
According to the new pastoral, sex must not be named imprudently, but its aspects, its correlations, and its effects must be pursued down to their slenderest ramifications: a shadow in a daydream, an image too slowly dispelled, a badly exorcised complicity between the bodys mechanics and the minds complacency: everything must be told.12

Why this telling of ones sexual desires, thoughts, and tendencies? Why is it no longer sufficient to confess ones sinful behavior? Because, as in the case of the prisons, what is at issue is no longer a sanction against the forbidden, but the intervention into ones personality. It is no longer a question of punishing wrongdoers: it is a question of molding personalities. And inasmuch as sex reveals the truth of ones personality as it did for much of Christianity and as well for Freud then the individual truths of ones sexual desire needs to

be told, listened to, categorized, surveiled, and intervened upon. In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault delineates four figures of sexuality that came to haunt the Victorian period, and those effects remain with us to this day. One of these figures is the masturbating child, the child of precocious sexuality, whose behavior must be monitored if he or she is not to go astray. Another is the hysterical woman, the woman whose body is, as Foucault puts it, saturated with sexuality,13 who must be watched closely in order to ensure that no disruptions occur in the family and social space through which this sexualized body must navigate. A third figure is the perverse adult, the one who has in fact gone astray, and who because of that requires a redoubled effort of monitoring. Finally, there is the Malthusian couple, the ideal point toward which confession, intervention, and social study seek to converge. The Malthusian couple is the normal that is achieved at best only partially and with the greatest effort of the psychological, social, and economic intervention services that pervade social space. As with Discipline and Punish, the first volume of The History of Sexuality examines the rise of normalization, the transformation from a view of human behavior that saw the chief distinction to be that of the permitted and the forbidden toward a view that sees instead an ideal point of normality ranged about with various degrees of abnormal behavior, behavior that requires study and intervention. Normalization, then, can stand as at least a partial answer to our first question: what is it that Foucault seeks to free himself from? There are parallels here between the dangers Foucault saw and those envisioned by Aurelius. For both, it is the common and unquestioned opinion of the time concerning who we are that needs confrontation and ultimately jettisoning. Moreover, that common opinion is instilled into us, making us be something, or some group of things, that we must struggle against if we are to free ourselves from it. Finally, that common opinion will lead us astray. For Aurelius, it leads us astray from our true nature and goal, which only an embrace of Stoicism can return to us. For Foucault, it leads

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us astray from what we might become and in addition reinforces other deleterious social practices, such as capitalism and homophobia. It is here, of course, in the leading astray, that we see the difference between Aurelius and the ancients generally, and Foucault: the difference between the ethical and the aesthetic. For Aurelius, there is a goal to be attained, and the project of his spiritual exercises is to cut his moorings to the common opinions that have installed themselves in his own being and that keep him from achieving that goal. Those common opinions do not desist; they have contributed to molding him into the creature he is. Thus, he must repeat those spiritual exercises on a regular basis if he is to reorient his life in the appropriate direction. Foucault, although concerned to cut his moorings to common opinion, is not beckoned by a goal. There is no straight path lying before him that, if he could only cleave to it, would lead him to an appropriate state of being. For him, the problem of normalization is not that it diverts us from the proper path of our lives but that it constrains us from creating a path, and that it does so in ways that contribute to other problems. If normalization diverts us, if it leads us astray, what it leads us astray from is, if I can put it this way, getting astray from ourselves. It keeps us not from achieving the truths of living but from creating them. It is, then, an aesthetics rather than an ethics that is suppressed by the practices of normalization. Seen this way, we can begin to understand Foucaults reluctance, at least in his writings, to answer the second question I raised to him: what is it that he seeks to free himself for? Much has been made of the allusive character of Foucaults remark in the first volume of The History of Sexuality that The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures,14 mostly in order to criticize its inadequacy. (Although I should mention in passing that that very quote has been treated at length and with surpassing skill by Ladelle McWhorter in her recent book Bodies and Pleasures.15) I suspect, however, that, criticism aside, allusiveness is precisely the point. Recall that while Aureliuss Meditations are not intended for the public eye, the writings of Foucault that we are discussing here were. Moreover, by the time Foucault writes them, he knows that they will be read by a vast number of people, and that among those there will be many who hope to discover in their pages a new ethics of the very kind Foucault is trying to avoid. Although Foucault does, in his life, seek to live an aesthetics consonant with a certain and particular reading of the idea of bodies and pleasures a fact to which I will return in a bit he cannot, without self-contradiction, impose an ethics upon those who read him. His reluctance to unfold a specific meaning for his rallying cry, then, as well as his general reluctance throughout his life to prescribe specific solutions to the problems whose genesis he traces, is not so much the failure to provide an answer to the question of how one should live as an attempt to keep alive among his readers the question of how one might live. These considerations bring us to the third question I posed to Foucault: in what ways are his writings supposed to assist him, and how might they assist us? We have seen in those writings that Foucault displays the constraining project of normalization, and that, in keeping with his aesthetic sensibility, he refrains from offering specific advice regarding the appropriate forms of resistance to normalization. However, as we have just suggested, his writings are not simply personal testaments. Unlike Aurelius, Foucault wrote his books to be published and to be read by a larger audience. In what ways, then, are they supposed to contribute to the aesthetic project? The first part of this question, the assistance these texts are supposed to provide him, can be answered in part by a pedestrian observation and in part by reference to biographical facts about Foucaults life. The observation is this: coming to understand who we have been made to be is an important step in loosening the grip that that making has upon us. Foucaults genealogical method approaches understanding by means of offering a history of what appears to be natural and inescapable, and showing it to be historically

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constituted and contingent. As Foucault puts the point:
There is an optimism that consists in saying that things couldnt be better. My optimism would rather consist in saying that so many things can be changed, fragile as they are, bound up more with circumstances than with necessities, more arbitrary than self-evident, more a matter of complex, but temporary, historical circumstances than with inevitable anthropological constraints.16 recognized as true, into rational principles of action. As an element of self-training, writing has, to use an expression that one finds in Plutarch, an ethopoietic function: it is an agent of the transformation of truth into ethos.17

I believe we should take the possessive term my optimism seriously here. Foucault is not prescribing for a movement but expressing a personal sense of liberation in knowing that the way he has been constituted, the view he has been taught to take of himself and that others have been taught to take of him, does not amount to a necessary way of being, but rather one whose grip relies upon failing to recognize that he does not have to be this way, but can be another, or perhaps many others. Much of Foucaults later life is precisely an experiment, or a series of experiments, in some of those other ways of being. He utilizes his knowledge in order, as he put it in the second volume of The History of Sexuality, to get free of himself, to stray afield of himself. Foucaults experiments in the practices of sadomasochism, with drugs, etc. can be seen as attempts, if perhaps halting and at times ambiguous ones, to engage in an aesthetic of bodies and pleasures that does not easily reduce itself to the givens of sex and desire. In this continuity between Foucaults writings, particularly those under discussion, and his life we can glimpse the way in which Foucault saw those writings as spiritual exercises, as attempts to liberate himself from the bonds of common opinion in order to be able to experiment in the creation of a life that would, at least to him, be one that might be called worthwhile. Here again, we might take as a cue a remark Foucault makes about ancient Hellenistic writing. In Self Writing, he remarks that, for many ancient philosophers,
writing constitutes an essential stage in the process to which the whole askesis leads: namely, the fashioning of accepted discourses,

Let me suggest as well that in answer to the second part of the question we are raising, of what assistance might these works be to us, that their primary value and perhaps, in the end, the only point of returning to these books once we have finished them for the first time, would be to use them as spiritual exercises for ourselves, to allow us to recognize, yet again each time, deep assumptions about who we must be that are not only expendable but in fact destructive. Pierre Hadot comments that for the ancients in contrast to our own time it was not only the architects of philosophical positions that were considered to be philosophers; it was all those who followed those positions, who incorporated them into their lives and molded themselves in accordance with the truths they thought to inhabit them. If Foucaults works, particularly those on the prisons and on sexuality, are to be more than fodder for debate among a small group of academics, then we need to become philosophers about them, in this ancient sense of philosophers. We need to re-read them, if indeed we do have that need, to be reminded, always again, always because we forget, that our psychological personalities are not written in stone, that our sexual desires are not the keys to our emotional lives, and that, most importantly, who we have come to be is not who we must be. These are lessons we cannot be reminded of enough; their denial is part of the common opinion that surrounds us, the ether in which we conduct our lives. In the rest of this piece, I would like to turn to a few objections that might be raised against the reading I am giving of Foucault. I do so not so much in the spirit of refuting them, but more in an attempt to deepen what it might mean for a text to be capable of being something like a spiritual exercise in the contemporary period. The first objection one might raise is that, since, in Foucaults writings, there are no standards for how we should be, for what we

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ought to make of ourselves, we should not properly think of these writings of Foucaults as spiritual exercises. Even if, in our own historical period, we are no longer compelled by a concept of the One that Hadot finds in the ancients, should it not be the case that a spiritual exercise offers us some standard that we ought to move toward instead of merely telling us what we ought to escape, whether that standard is that of the good life according to the ancients or the moral good according to more modern philosophers? Hadot, in criticizing Foucaults reading of the ancients, has a similar worry in mind. In objecting that Foucaults approach is too aesthetic, he is concerned that Foucaults texts might lead us toward, as he calls it, a new form of Dandyism.18 Should it not be, then, that for a writing to qualify as a spiritual exercise, it sets a standard for people to conform to in jettisoning what I have called the common opinion? To answer this objection fully would take more time than I can devote to it here. I will only trace the outlines of an answer that I have developed at length elsewhere.19 A distinction needs to be made, I believe, between setting goals or standards toward which a life should move, and having moral or ethical principles generally. When I said that Foucaults works are more aesthetic than ethical, I did not mean to imply that there are no ethical or moral principles implicit in his work. Foucault himself was notoriously reluctant to endorse moral principles (in part because he himself failed to make the distinction between a moral principle and a principle of how one should live), but we need not follow him in this. Although Foucault did not set standards for living in his writings, their critical edge is informed by a rigorous set of principles that can be discovered underlying much of those writings passion. Among them are the principles that people should be made aware of how they are being molded, that they should not have their lives exploited for the benefit of the powerful, that normalization as a historical force needs to be criticized and abandoned, that people should not be subject to psychological interpretation, that sex should allow for pleasure and should not be the object of sanction or interrogation. There are others, of course, but the idea here is not to survey the full moral scaffolding of Foucaults works. It is simply to indicate that the absence of a specific view of what life ought to look like does not entail that Foucaults works provide no form of moral or ethical guidance. Hadots worry about Dandyism drives in a direction that is similar but more specific. His concern, I think, is that by abandoning any relation to the Whole or the One, Foucault may be promoting an individualism that allows for personal expression but at the cost of social solidarity and perhaps real political critique. He applies this criticism particularly to the latter two volumes of The History of Sexuality, but the question should be asked of Foucaults perspective as a whole in his later works. Although I can understand the motivation for such a worry, Dandyism is not a necessary consequence of the perspective Foucault develops. He does, it is true, focus his energies on a cultivation of the self in the second and third volumes on sexuality, but if we read those volumes in light of the earlier works which set the stage for them, the works on the prisons and on sexuality, then a different picture begins to emerge. What Foucault provides in the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality are not alternative styles of self-formation that he endorses. Instead, he is articulating approaches to self-formation, particularly in the sexual realm, that differ from our own. He presents them not because of their superiority to our own approaches but because of their cultural distance from them. To read the last two volumes on sexuality is to become strange to ourselves, to see that humans can live very differently from the way we do currently, that they can cultivate themselves in manners foreign to our own, and thus that we ought not to take the practices of our own self-formation as natural or inevitable. That reading would be continuous with the intent of the first volume on sexuality and with Discipline and Punish, where what is at issue is not the prescription of alternatives but the necessity to jettison the naturalness of our current way of thinking about these matters. It is not because Foucault seeks to present the ancients as a model that he turns to them; it is because he

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seeks to make us foreign to ourselves. Whether or not his interpretation of the ancients is an accurate one is another matter and, as I mentioned, one that I do not have the background to address. But inasmuch as Hadot sees Foucault as promoting the lifestyle of the ancients, he has missed the direction of those writings. A second objection to seeing these works as spiritual exercises might rely on the form of the works rather than their content. If we contrast Discipline and Punish or the first volume of The History of Sexuality with, say, Aureliuss Meditations, we find that while the latter has a number of simple lessons repeated over and over, like prayers or mantras, the former are both more complex and less repetitive. When spiritual exercises are at stake, it would seem that simplicity matters, since the incorporation of lessons for living is often a far more difficult task than the grasp of intellectual concepts. This is not to deny that abstractions can be difficult; of course they can. But the lessons of spiritual exercises, if they are to reach their goal of modifying how we relate to ourselves and to one another, must cut against norms of behavior, patterns of thought, and emotional instincts that have been long ingrained in each of us. It would seem, then, that if we are to succeed in incorporating those lessons, in allowing our lives to be reoriented by them, the lessons themselves would have to be simple. The lessons of Stoicism that Aurelius trains himself in are indeed simple. They are, of course, difficult. But they are simple. How could a spiritual exercise be otherwise? This objection points to something far more important than philosophers often allow themselves to recognize. In the history of philosophys increasing alliance with, and reliance on, the university, we have largely forsaken the relationship of philosophy to the conduct of our lives. Hadot remarks, Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists.20 I believe that, contrary to the practice of much of philosophy, any philosophical view that seeks to intersect with our lives should be as simple and as understandable as possible. What makes Foucaults writings on the prisons and on sexuality complex is not so much their style as a certain necessity of their treatment, a necessity whose implications Foucault was among the first to recognize. In fact, if we look at the evolution of Foucaults writing style from the earlier works to the later ones, we in fact discover that the later writings are far more accessible than the earlier ones. I understand, for instance, that Discipline and Punish was widely read among prisoners. I do not think the same is likely to be said of, for instance, The Order of Things. What, then, is the necessity that forces complexity on these volumes? It has to do with the nature of power. Foucault recognizes that power is not only repressive; it does not only stop things from happening. It is also creative; it makes things happen. Power is not merely a limit on behavior beyond which it cannot go; it can also put something in place that did not exist before. In fact, in the last several hundred years, it is the creative aspect of power that has emerged as more significant than its repressive aspect. This recognition plays an important role in Foucaults belief that what are often presented to us as anthropological constraints are in fact historical productions that are not inevitably bound to who we must be. I will not linger over Foucaults claim that power is creative as well as repressive here it is a well-known view but I want to draw the connection between the creativity of power and the complexity of Foucaults later writings. For if the common opinion that shapes us into being who we are is a product of history masquerading as an inevitability, then part of the process of getting free of ourselves can be to expose that masquerade, to see it for what it is. I take the book on the prisons and the first sexuality book to be nothing other than exposes of that precise kind. If we can see ourselves as historically constituted by relations of power that are themselves intolerable (to use a Foucaultian term), then freeing ourselves from them for other types of self-constitution will be that much easier. But to emphasize what I said earlier what makes these writings ripe for reading and re-reading is that the naturalness with which the world presents our current

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constraints to us makes all the more urgent the task of keeping in mind the real contingency of those constraints. We can only surmount the common opinion of who we are if we recognize that that opinion is not ineluctable. And thus we return to Foucaults writings after having turned the back cover the first time. I want to close with a final objection, because it is this objection, I think, that opens out onto a set of wider tasks that philosophy may embrace. One way to put the objection would be to say this: that my reading of Foucault has allowed too much to fall within the category of spiritual exercises. If works like Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality can stand as spiritual exercises, why not any book of ethics, or any treatise on political philosophy, or for that matter any other history book that is normatively grounded? Does my perspective not lose the distinctiveness of a text like Aureliuss Meditations by papering over the contrast between it and other works that should not properly be called spiritual exercises? I am sympathetic with the direction in which this objection is headed. It seems to say that if we count the works under consideration as spiritual exercises, we ought to count many other things as spiritual exercises as well. And to that, I say, so be it. One of the key problems that philosophy faces is not that it is too oriented to how we live our lives, but that it is not so oriented enough. More of us ought to ask ourselves more of the time whether what we are reading is going to shape our lives in important ways, and return to that reading or not based upon the answer to that question. Further, more of us should write with that question in mind. Might what I am writing shape my life or the lives of others in important ways? Does it have a chance to make a difference in how people see and act toward themselves and toward others? Are the lessons I am imparting simply academic exercises or might they help us see, think, and be differently? And so in replying to the objection, I do not want to draw a bright line between those writings that are worthy of being considered spiritual exercises and those that are not. Instead, let me just point to a characteristic that Foucaults writings possess that, at least to me, make them more likely to be read and re-read as spiritual exercises. I am happy to admit that these reasons may not hold for others. I offer them only in the hope that they may resonate with a few of Foucaults readers. Foucaults writings have always spoken to me in the space out of which I live. The question of who I am, asked from a psychological perspective, long haunted me, as I suspect it has haunted others. Perhaps that haunting was a bit deeper for me, since until I read Discipline and Punish, I was in training to be a psychologist. But I do not think such training is necessary to feel the force of that book. How many of us have not asked ourselves whether our desires the ones we wanted most to act upon, or at least to ensure that sooner or later they were acted on how many of us have not worried that those desires were abnormal or inappropriate? How many of us have not felt the pull of wanting to fit in, to hone the sharp edges of our personal styles in order to keep ostracism at bay, or in order to avoid being looked at askance by those who we would like to tell ourselves we do not respect? One of my favorite lines of in all of Aureliuss Meditations is the following: I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.21 Foucault speaks to me precisely there. In telling me about the history of normalization, in offering me a story about the role of psychological thinking and sexual conformism in forming us to be the sad small creatures we too often are, Foucault shines a light in a dark place in my own life, a light that allows me to see my way out. He does not tell me the right path; he does not point and say to me, Youre here, go there. And for that I am grateful. But I am also grateful for the obstacles he has helped me avoid. So what, then, remains to us now, as philosophers? What remains to us of our thought and our lives? Let me suggest this, by way of conclusion. What remains to us lies not in the way of hitching our wagon to the current fashion in academics: not to becoming capitalists of the concept nor midwives to the ethics of our institutions. Nor does it lie in refusal or withdrawal, in proclaiming the world all the

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worse for the end of the relevance of philosophy. It lies, rather, in philosophy as Hadot sees it in the ancients and as I have found it in Foucault. It lies in asking ourselves, each of us alone and many of us together, how we might create lives worth living, how we might understand what we have become in order to wrestle with its intolerable aspects and to embrace what we might make of it. And in that sense, what remains to us as philosophers today is simply to return to what many of us experienced when, years back, we stumbled across that first fascinating thought that shone within us for days after we had read it, and in that moment recognized what a life in philosophy might be.22
10 The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New Y ork: Pantheon Books,1985) 8. 11 Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New Y ork: Random House,1978) 193. 12 The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, trans. Robert , Hurley (New Y ork: Random House,1978) 19. 13 The History of Sexuality,Vol.1104. 14 The History of Sexuality,Vol.1157 . 15 Published by Indiana UP, in 1999. 16 Practicing Criticism, an interview with Didier Eribon, trans. Alan Sheridan, in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy Culture, ed. Lawrence Kritzman , (New Y ork: Routledge,1988) 156. 17 Self Writing, in Ethics: T ruth and Subjectivity, ed. Paul Rabinow (New Y ork: The New Press, 1997) 207^22, at 209. As I remarked above, however, we must bear in mind that Foucaults approach to the idea of truth is very different from that of the ancients. 18 Reflection on the Idea of the Cultivation of the Self, 211. 19 See my The Moral Theory of Poststructuralism (cited above). 20 Philosophy as a Way of Life 272. 21 Meditations 12.4 (Dover edn, 94). 22 I would like to thank John Sellars for his careful reading and detailed comments on an earlier draft of this piece.

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notes
1 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.1, trans. G. Long, revised (Mineola: Dover,1997) 8. 2 John Sellars has pointed out to me that the original Greek title of the Meditations was, in fact, ton eis heauton, which is translated as to himself. 3 Meditations 4.37 (Dover edn, 25). 4 Philosophy as a Way of Life, in Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase, ed. Arnold Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) 265. Hadot has a more extended discussion of Aureliuss thought in The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001). 5 The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the ' College de France 1981^1982, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Frederic Gros (New Y ork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) 292. 6 Spiritual Exercises, in Philosophy as a Way of Life 82. 7 The Moral Theory of Poststructuralism (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP,1995). 8 Reflections on the Idea of the Cultivation of the Self, in Philosophy as a Way of Life 21 1. 9 The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul (New Y ork: Pantheon,1984) 350. Rabinow

Todd May Department of Philosophy & Religion Clemson University 126D Hardin Hall Clemson, SC 29634 USA E-mail: mayt@clemson.edu