Ethical Aspects

of Nietzsche and Foucault’s Writing on Self-Formation

PhD Anna-Lena Carlsson
NSE conference in Århus, Denmark, May 31-June 3, 2007.

IN THIS PAPER, I will address the notion of self-formation in Nietzsche and

Foucault’s writing. In regard to the title, “ethical aspects” refers to the question

of self-creation and interaction with already existing ways of life in Nietzsche

and Foucault’s line of thought.

TURNING FIRSTLY TO NIETZSCHE ON SELF-FORMATION: Nietzsche uses the

concepts ’art’ and ’artistic’, not only in references to artworks, but also in an

expanded sense, profoundly linked with our human existence in — and

understanding of — the world.1 In The Gay Science (1882), he writes that giving

“style” to one’s character is a great and rare art.2 “[W]e want to be the poets of

our lives”.3 Throughout his production, Nietzsche pictures the pre-Socratic

Greek culture as acknowledging an artistic creativity as fundamental for human

lives.

As I have argued elsewhere,4 there is a life-affirming and a life-

negating way of forming one’s life in Nietzsche’s thought — and it is the life-

1
Nietzsche, KSA 1, 883.
2
Nietzsche, KSA 3, §290, s.530.
3
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, book IV, §299, p.240 [KSA 3, 538].
4
Carlsson, Anna-Lena, ’’…is it hunger or superabundance that has here become creative?’’ Nietzsche
on Creativity in Art and Life, diss. (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2004). See also ’’Friedrich
Nietzsche and Michel Foucault on Aesthetics and Life’’, NSE conference in Jyväskylä, May 2006.

1
affirming kind that is of the highest value. To affirm life, in its highest state, is to

allow life to be basically creative and destructive in regard to conventional

truths and values. A life-negating way of existing, then, denies human beings as

fundamentally creative. In the absence of an immanent justification of one’s self,

this being depends on something external for its justification — such as God.

Consequently, according to Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols (1888), a Christian

artist does not exist.5

With the exception of Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy

(1872), the life-affirming self, suggested for the future, is described as non-

metaphysical and as forming itself according to its own degree of power; its

will to power. Accordingly, this future way of being affirms life as hierarchical.

This is seen in Nietzsche’s writing of the masters of morality6 and

”Übermensch”.7

In regard to the two-fold of self-creation and moral values,

Nietzsche writes, in The Genealogy of Morals (1887): “The tremendous labor of

that which I have called ’morality of mores’ [G. “die Sittlichkeit der Sitte”

(“Sitte”/morality is understood as customs, practices, not exclusively moral)] —

the labor performed by man upon himself during the greater part of the

existence of the human race […], finds in this its meaning, its great justification,

notwithstanding the severity, tyranny, stupidity, and idiocy involved in it: with

the aid of the morality of mores and the social straitjacket, man was actually

5
Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols (1990b), 83f. [KSA 6, 117].
6
See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals.
7
See Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra.

2
made calculable.”8 The ordering human conduct according to ’morality of

mores’, is contrasted with the sovereign individual, “liberated again from

morality of custom, autonomous and supramoral […], in short, the man who

has his own independent […] will […] and […] a consciousness of his own

power and freedom”. This man, he continues, “possesses his [own] measure of

value”.9 Nietzsche favours the values created by a self-mastered type of life, who

reaches beyond the ’good’ and ’evil’ of ’morality of mores’; away from the

processes of ’normalization’ within a culture of slave-morality.10

The practices of the life-affirming self, in a life-negating culture of

’morality of mores’, are, for example: solitude, i.e., walking one’s own path

without following — or being followed by — someone else; forgetfulness,

rather than a memorizing of the past; questioning of old values at the same time

as one creates anew; and a continuously evaluation and ordering into ranks, in

that one always ask oneself: “[I]s it hunger or superabundance that has here

become creative?”11

TURNING TO FOUCAULT’S WRITING ON SELF-FORMATION: In his last years

of production, Foucault turns his attention from the relationship of the subject

and games of truth, to an interest in the practices (or techniques) of the self, i.e.

the care of the self. He is interested in subjectivation, i.e. the processes of the

8
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, essay II, s.59 [KSA 5, 293].
9
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Mprals, essay II, s.59f.
10
See Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals.
11
See The Case of Wagner.

3
self; the self understood as relational (to itself and others).12 Keith Ansell-

Pearson has described this as a turn from viewing the subject as an effect of

power to a more Nietzschean perspective of self-creation.13

In The History of Sexuality (1976-84), the lectures entitled The

Hermeneutics of the Subject (1981-82), and in several interviews from the 80’s,

Foucault emphasises the ancient Greek (and Latin) saying ’’Take care of your

self’’,14 which in a Greco-Roman culture was coupled with the more famous

dictum ’’Know thyself’’. The ’’care of the self’’, Foucault says, was ’’one of the

main principles of […] social and personal conduct and for the art of life’’15 — a

principle, he argues, that has been neglected in the history of ideas: “In Greco-

Roman culture, knowledge of oneself appeared as the consequence of the care

of the self. In the modern world, knowledge of oneself constitutes the

fundamental principle.’’16 The care of the self, he states, was “required for right

conduct and the proper practice of freedom, in order to know oneself […], as

well as to form oneself”.17 He describes “the care of the self” as actions, “by

which one changes, purifies, transforms, and transfigures oneself’’.18 This

involves a series of practices, for example: ’’techniques of meditation, of

memorization of the past, and of examination of conscience.19

12
See also Shrift (1995), 49f.
13
See Ansell-Pearson (1991), 275 & 281f. He refers to Deleuze’s Pourparles, 127.
14
It is for example found in Plato’s Alcibiades I; in the Socratic dialogues, Xenophon and Philo of
Alexandria. Foucault, ’’Technologies of the Self’’, in Foucault (1997b), 226.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid., 228.
17
Ibid., Interview: ’’The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom’’, Foucault
(1997b), 285.
18
Idem, The Hermeneutics of the Subject (2004), 11.
19
Ibid.

4
 It is of significance to note, that these practices are models already

existing in the culture.20 It is still not a matter of adjusting to a system of rules; it

is not a process of normalization.21 He also underlines the aspect of turning

oneself into a beautiful form — “in the eyes of others, of oneself, and of the

future generations for which one might serve as an example”.22

An important matter is what Foucault terms governmentality. He

stresses governmentality as “[t]he government of the self by the self in its

articulation with relations to others (as one finds it in pedagogy, advice for

conduct, spiritual direction, the prescription of models of life, etc.)”.23

Subjevtivation, in the light of governmentality, then contains an element of (the

self’s) freedom within the margins of existing models of life.24 Governmentality,

Foucault writes, “implies the ethical relation of self to self, and […] concerns

strategies for the direction of conduct of free individuals”.25 The practices of

self-formation are self-directing and depending on others (and their practices of

self-creation).26

Turning to Christianity, however, Foucault finds ’’a way of caring

for oneself’’ in “one’s salvation”, attained ’’through the renunciation of self’’; in

20
Idem, Interview: ’’The Ethics of the Concern of the Self …’’, in Foucault (1997b), 291.
21
Idem, Interview: ’’The Ethics of the Concern of the Self …’’, in Foucault (1997b), 291. In a
working session 1983, Foucault stresses, concerning the Stoic ethics, that the ’’principal aim […]
of this kind of ethics, was an aesthetic one. First, this kind of ethics was only a problem of
personal choice. Second, it was reserved for a few people […]. The reason for making this choice
was the will to live a beautiful life, and to leave to others memories of a beautiful existence.”
Nietzsche, Interview: ’’The Ethics of the Concern of the Self …’’, in Foucault (1997b), 291.
22
Foucault, “The Concern for Truth”, in Foucault (1990c), 259.
23
Quoted from Davidson (1994), s.119. Reference to Foucault, “Subjectivité et verité, 1980-81”, in
Résumé des Cours, 1970-1982 (Paris: Julliard, 1989), 134-35.
24
See also Minson (1985), 44.
25
Quoted from Dean, “ ’A social structure of many souls’: Moral regulation, government, and
self-formation” (1994). See The Final Foucault (1988)
26
This interpretation is also done by Dean (1994), 155.

5
an adjustment to a system of rules.27 In The History of Sexuality, he writes, that

the Greek relation to truth was leading to “a way of life whose moral value did

not depend either on one’s being in conformity with a code of behavior, or on

an effort of purification [as later, in Christianity], but on certain formal

principles in the use of pleasures, in the way one distributed them, in the limits

one observed, in the hierarchy one respected.”28

Foucault then also turns to his contemporary culture: ’’[W]hy must

the care of the self occur only through the concern for truth?” he asks.29 From

Antiquity to Christianity, he continues, we have passed from a morality that

was a search for a ’’personal ethics’’ to a ’’morality as obedience to a system of

rules.’’30 ’’[T]he idea of a morality as obedience to a code of rules is [however]

now disappearing […] [a]nd to this absence of morality, corresponds […] the

search for an aesthetics of existence’’.31

THERE ARE INDEED SIMILARITIES to be found, in Nietzsche and Foucault’s

thinking on self-creation.32 We can distinguish between a life-affirming and life-

27
Ibid, ’’The Ethics of the Concern for the Self …’’, in Foucault (1997b), 285. One of his examples
is Gregory of Nyssa’s Treatise on Virginity, in its denial of the care of the self in a renunciation of
any earthly attachment. Ibid.
28
Quoted from Michael Mahon (1992), 175. Mahon’s reference is to the French edition of L´usage
des plaisirs, p.103.
29
Foucault, ’’The Ethics of the Concern of the Self …’’, in Foucault (1997b), 295.
30
Foucault, ’’An Aesthetics of Existence’’, in Foucault (1990c), 49.
31
Foucault, ’’An Aesthetics of Existence’’, in Foucault (1990c), 49. In a lecture 1982, he argues
concerning one of the techniques of the self: ’’From the eighteenth century to the present, the
techniques of verbalization have been reinserted in a different context by the so-called human
sciences in order to use theme without renunciation of the self but to constitute, positively, a new
self.’’ [My italics.] Foucault, ’’Technologies of the Self’’, in Foucault, (1997b), 249.
32
For an overview of important works on Nietzsche’s influence on Foucault, see Mahon (1992),
9-17 and Leslie Paul Thiele, “The Agony of Politics: The Nietzschean Roots of Foucault’s
Thought”, The American Political Science Review, vol. 84, no., 3 (Sep., 1990), 907-925.

6
negating type of artistic existence in Nietzsche’s writing. This two-fold can also

be detected in Foucault’s thinking, when he distinguishes the practices of self-

formation that are self-sufficient, yet depending on others, from the self-

negating caring for oneself in adjustment to a system of rules.

There are, nonetheless, differences to be found. One of them

concerns the question of self-creation and interaction with other existing ways

of life.33 Nietzsche pictures a self-sufficient powerful wanderer, who walks his

own path, in solitude, as a radical “otherness”, in no dependence of ways of

lives in a life-negating culture. Foucault introduces the thought of

governmentality, allowing him to consider the self’s work, upon itself, in terms

of both freedom and an acknowledging of already existing ways of life. This is

an important difference.

Then again, there is one figure of thought in Nietzsche’s earliest

production, that can be compared with Foucault’s thinking. In The Birth of

Tragedy he distinguishes a purely Apollonian form-giving type of life, from the

Apollonian formed Dionysian state of existence, in ancient pre-Socratic

Greece.34 The Apollonian mode is depicted as a dreamlike life; a plastic energy

forming a harmonious whole.35 This life and culture follows the principle of

individuation, where self-knowledge — in the Delphic dictum ’’Know thyself’’

33
For a general discussion on the question of aesthetics and ethics, see, for example, Bredella,
Lother (1996), “Aesthetics and Ethics: Incommensurable, Identical or Conflicting?”, in Ethics and
Aesthetics: The Moral Turn of Postmodernism, eds Gerhard Hoffmann and Alfred Hornung
(Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter).
34
Idem, The Birth of Tragedy (1967), 34 [KSA 1, 26].
35
Idem, KSA 1, 27ff. and 37f.

7
— is combined with the saying ’’Nothing in excess’’.36 These demands,

Nietzsche holds, occur side by side with the aesthetic necessity for beautiful

form.37 This artistic moderation of life is indeed unfolded as an affirmation of

life, but it is lacking the Dionysian overthrow of the established orders. It is

therefore of a lower degree — and not emphasised in his later works.

TO CONCLUDE, Foucault’s “aesthetics of existence”, suggested as of relevance

in his contemporary time, does indeed share similarities with Nietzsche’s life-

affirming type of self-formation. Foucault, however, introduces the thought of

governmentality, allowing him to consider the self’s work, upon itself, in terms

of a search for freedom as well as an acknowledging of already existing ways of

life.

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Nietzsche: Power, the Subject, and Political Theory”, in Nietzsche-Studien, Vol. 20.
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Conflicting?”, in Ethics and Aesthetics: The Moral Turn of Postmodernism, eds
Gerhard Hoffmann and Alfred Hornung (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C.
Winter)
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36
Ibid., 40.
37
Idem, The Birth of Tragedy (1967), 46 [KSA 1, 40]. In a working session 1983, Foucault stresses,
concerning the Stoic ethics, that the ’’principal aim […] of this kind of ethics, was an aesthetic
one. […] The reason for making this choice was the will to live a beautiful life, and to leave to
others memories of a beautiful existence.’’ From a working session with Foucault. See Foucault,
’’On the Genealogy of Ethics’’, in Foucault (1997b), 254.

8
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