Magazine: Political Theory, May, 1993
ABOUT THE BEGINNING OF THE HERMENEUTICS OF THE SELF
---------------------------------------------------
Two Lectures at Dartmouth
INTRODUCTORY NOTE MARK BLASIUS, City University of New York
In the fall of 1980, Michel Foucault visited a number of cities and
universities in the United States. He gave lectures at Dartmouth College,
the University of California at Berkeley, and Princeton University and
gave a month-long seminar and a public lecture at New York University.
The two lectures published here were delivered at Dartmouth on November
17 and 24, 1980 under the titles "Subjectivity and Truth" and
"Christianity and Confession." Foucault delivered the lectures from
texts handwritten in English. An earlier version of these lectures was
transcribed and edited by Thomas Keenan. I have re-edited them, but very
lightly, to preserve their spoken quality, using tapes provided by
Dartmouth's Office of Instructional Services and Educational Research:
all the notes were added during the editing process. Earlier, Foucault
had given more or less the same papers as the Howison Lectures at
Berkeley on October 20-21. I have added in the notes some passages
transcribed from the Howison Lectures for the sake of filling out the
lectures published here, and I thank Paul Rabinow for his assistance in
this. (For instance, at one point in Berkeley, Foucault remarked that
"the title of these two lectures could have been, and should have been,
in fact, 'About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,'" a wish
I have honored here.) On a few occasions, these lectures overlap
slightly with other published work by Foucault, which I have marked in
the notes.
These lectures mark a transition in Foucault's work from studying
systems of power relations (Discipline and Punish and The History of
Sexuality, Vol. 1) to studying the creation of ethical agency (The
History of Sexuality, Vols. 2, 3, and 4). Indeed, with this transition
and from his earlier works on the history of systems of thought (Madness
and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The
Archaeology of Knowledge), Foucault begins to complete the analysis of
three axes of experience: truth, power, and ethics. The lectures that
follow hint at the themes that would appear later in volumes 2 and 3 of
The History of Sexuality, works largely and undeservedly overlooked by
political theorists. However, Foucault said in a late interview upon
their publication, when asked if he wrote these last books "for"
contemporary liberation movements, that he wrote them not "for" them but
"as a function of a present situation." He said of volume 2, The Use of
Pleasure, the volume most about "sex," that the problem of recent
liberation movements was similar to the one he studied in this book
about Ancient Greece: to elaborate an ethics through sex. The third
volume, The Care of the Self, can be read (at least in part) as a
perspective on how to adapt and direct the power exercised by medical,
quasi-medical, and moral experts in the time of the AIDS epidemic.
Finally, the fourth volume, The Confession of the Flesh, completed but
as yet unpublished, is about early Christian sexual ethics. Its
relevance to what concerns us today can be gleaned from a discussion
(recorded on the tape but not included here) between Foucault and a gay
graduate student after one of the lectures printed here. The student
questioned Foucault's endorsement of John Boswell's Christianity, Social
Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago, 1980) because of the patent
hostility of Catholicism toward homosexuality and sexuality generally.
Foucault countered that an antisexual Judeo-Christian morality is a
dangerous myth that is not supported by historical evidence and has
political implications. Rather, said Foucault, what is significant for
sexuality is that Christianity inaugurated a new attitude of people not
so much toward sexual acts and the code of sexual ethics, but toward
themselves, and this new relationship of people to themselves, the
necessity to scrutinize and discover the truth about oneself and then
verbalize this truth to others, affected people's attitude toward
sexuality. Both Freudian discourse on sexuality as well as the discourse
of self-disclosure as a talking cure are recognizable in the "small
origins" analyzed in these two lectures.
The significance for political theory of these lectures is indicated by
Foucault at the end of the second one: "one of the main political
problems would be nowadays . . . the politics of ourselves." The
lectures trace the genealogy of the self: its constitution through a
continuous analysis of one's thoughts under a hermeneutic principle of
making sure they are really one's own; and the self's iteration and
social reinforcement through an ongoing verbalization of this self-
decipherment to others. Foucault elsewhere analyzed (The History of
Sexuality, Vol. 1) how techniques inherited from the Christian
confession allow for the self to be created and subjected within
relations of power that constitute modern social institutions. A
politics of our selves would entail a recognition that if the self is
"nothing else than the historical correlation of the technology" that
has come to create it, then the aim would be to get rid of the
"sacrifice which is linked to those technologies." This sacrifice is
twofold: it is the creation of a positive foundation for the self by
means of procedures that at once makes us amenable to social control and
dependent upon it, as well as the production and then marginalization of
entire categories of people who do not fit what the foundation posits as
"normal." We can rid ourselves of the imposed sacrifice through what
Foucault called a "critical ontology of ourselves." This is, he wrote,
"at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are
imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond
them . . . in the care brought to the process of putting historico-
critical reflection to the test of concrete practices" (The Foucault
Reader, p. 50).
SUBJECTIVITY AND TRUTH
In a work consecrated to the moral treatment of madness and published in
1840, a French psychiatrist, Leuret, tells of the manner in which he has
treated one of his patients--treated and, as you can imagine, of course,
cured. One morning Dr. Leuret takes Mr. A., his patient, into a shower
room. He makes him recount in detail his delirium.
"Well, all that," says the doctor, "is nothing but madness. Promise me
not to believe in it anymore."
The patient hesitates, then promises.
"That's not enough," replies the doctor. "You have already made similar
promises, and you haven't kept them." And the doctor turns on a cold
shower above the patient's head.
"Yes, yes! I am mad!" the patient cries.
The shower is turned off, and the interrogation is resumed.
"Yes, I recognize that I am mad," the patient repeats, adding, "I
recognize, because you are forcing me to do so."
Another shower. Another confession. The interrogation is taken up again.
"I assure you, however," says the patient, "that I have heard voices and
seen enemies around me."
Another shower.
"Well," says Mr. A., the patient, "I admit it. I am mad; all that was
madness."[1]
To make someone suffering from mental illness recognize that he is mad
is a very ancient procedure. Everybody in the old medicine, before the
middle of the nineteenth century, everybody was convinced of the
incompatibility between madness and recognition of madness. And in the
works, for instance, of the seventeenth and of the eighteenth centuries,
one finds many examples of what one might call truth-therapies. The mad
would be cured if one managed to show them that their delirium is
without any relation to reality.
But, as you see, the technique used by Leuret is altogether different.
He is not trying to persuade his patient that his ideas are false or
unreasonable. What happens in the head of Mr. A. is a matter of
indifference for the doctor. Leuret wishes to obtain a precise act: the
explicit affirmation, "I am mad." It is easy to recognize here the
transposition within psychiatric therapy of procedures which have been
used for a long time in judicial and religious institutions. To declare
aloud and intelligibly the truth about oneself--I mean, to confess--has
in the Western world been considered for a long time either as a
condition for redemption for one's sins or as an essential item in the
condemnation of the guilty. The bizarre therapy of Leuret may be read as
an episode in the progressive culpabilization of madness. But, I would
wish, rather, to take it as a point of departure for a more general
reflection on this practice of confession, and on the postulate, which
is generally accepted in Western societies, that one needs for his own
salvation to know as exactly as possible who he is and also, which is
something rather different, that he needs to tell it as explicitly as
possible to some other people. The anecdote of Leuret is here only as an
example of the strange and complex relationships developed in our
societies between individuality, discourse, truth, and coercion.
In order to justify the attention I am giving to what is seemingly so
specialized a subject, let me take a step back for a moment. All that,
after all is only for me a means that I will use to take on a much more
general theme--that is, the genealogy of the modern subject.
In the years that preceded the second war, and even more so after the
second war, philosophy in France and, I think, in all continental Europe,
was dominated by the philosophy of the subject. I mean that philosophy
set as its task par excellence the foundation of all knowledge and the
principle of all signification as stemming from the meaningful subject.
The importance given to this question of the meaningful subject was of
course due to the impact of Husserl--only his Cartesian Meditations and
the Crisis were generally known in France[2]--but the centrality of the
subject was also tied to an institutional context. For the French
university, since philosophy began with Descartes, it could only advance
in a Cartesian manner. But we must also take into account the political
conjuncture. Given the absurdity of wars, slaughters, and despotism, it
seemed then to be up to the individual subject to give meaning to his
existential choices.
With the leisure and distance that came after the war, this emphasis on
the philosophical subject no longer seemed so self-evident. Two hitherto-
hidden theoretical paradoxes could no longer be avoided. The first one
was that the philosophy of consciousness had failed to found a
philosophy of knowledge, and especially scientific knowledge, and the
second was that this philosophy of meaning paradoxically had failed to
take into account the formative mechanisms of signification and the
structure of systems of meaning. I am aware that another form of thought
claimed then to have gone beyond the philosophy of the subject--this, of
course, was Marxism. It goes without saying--and it goes indeed better
if we say it--that neither materialism nor the theory of ideologies
successfully constituted a theory of objectivity or of signification.
Marxism put itself forward as a humanistic discourse that could replace
the abstract subject with an appeal to the real man, to the concrete
man. It should have been clear at the time that Marxism carried with it
a fundamental theoretical and practical weakness: the humanistic
discourse hid the political reality that the Marxists of this period
nonetheless supported.
With the all-to-easy clarity of hindsight--what you call, I think, the
"Monday morning quarterback"--let me say that there were two possible
paths that led beyond this philosophy of the subject. First, the theory
of objective knowledge and, two, an analysis of systems of meaning, or
semiology. The first of these was the path of logical positivism. The
second was that of a certain school of linguistics, psychoanalysis, and
anthropology, all generally grouped under the rubric of structuralism.
These were not the directions I took. Let me announce once and for all
that I am not a structuralist, and I confess with the appropriate
chagrin that I am not an analytic philosopher--nobody is perfect. I have
tried to explore another direction. I have tried to get out from the
philosophy of the subject through a genealogy of this subject, by
studying the constitution of the subject across history which has led us
up to the modern concept of the self. This has not always been an easy
task, since most historians prefer a history of social processes,[3] and
most philosophers prefer a subject without history. This has neither
prevented me from using the same material that certain social
historians have used, nor from recognizing my theoretical debt to those
philosophers who, like Nietzsche, have posed the question of the
historicity of the subject.[4]
Up to the present I have proceeded with this general project in two
ways. I have dealt with the modern theoretical constitutions that were
concerned with the subject in general. I have tried to analyze in a
previous book theories of the subject as a speaking, living, working
being.[5] I have also dealt with the more practical understanding
formed in those institutions like hospitals, asylums, and prisons,
where certain subjects became objects of knowledge and at the same time
objects of domination.[6] And now, I wish to study those forms of
understanding which the subject creates about himself. Those forms of
self-understanding are important I think to analyze the modern
experience of sexuality.[7]
But since I have started with this last type of project I have been
obliged to change my mind on several important points. Let me introduce
a kind of autocritique. It seems, according to some suggestions by
Habermas, that one can distinguish three major types of techniques in
human societies: the techniques which permit one to produce, to
transform, to manipulate things; the techniques which permit one to use
sign systems; and the techniques which permit one to determine the
conduct of individuals, to impose certain wills on them, and to submit
them to certain ends or objectives. That is to say, there are techniques
of production, techniques of signification, and techniques of
domination.[8]
Of course, if one wants to study the history of natural sciences, it is
useful if not necessary to take into account techniques of production
and semiotic techniques. But since my project was concerned with the
knowledge of the subject, I thought that the techniques of domination
were the most important, without any exclusion of the rest. But,
analyzing the experience of sexuality, I became more and more aware that
there is in all societies, I think, in all societies whatever they are,
another type of techniques: techniques which permit individuals to
effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own
bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct,
and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves,
and to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of
supernatural power, and so on. Let's call this kind of techniques a
techniques or technology of the self.[9]
I think that if one wants to analyze the genealogy of the subject in
Western civilization, he has to take into account not only techniques of
domination but also techniques of the self. Let's say: he has to take
into account the interaction between those two types of techniques--
techniques of domination and techniques of the self. He has to take into
account the points where the technologies of domination of individuals
over one another have recourse to processes by which the individual acts
upon himself. And conversely, he has to take into account the points
where the techniques of the self are integrated into structures of
coercion or domination. The contact point, where the individuals are
driven[10] by others is tied to the way they conduct themselves,[11] is
what we can call, I think, government.[12] Governing people, in the
broad meaning of the word,[13] governing people is not a way to force
people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile
equilibrium, with complementarily and conflicts between techniques which
assure coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or
modified by himself.
When I was studying asylums, prisons, and so on, I insisted, I think,
too much on the techniques of domination. What we can call discipline is
something really important in these kinds of institutions, but it is
only at one aspect of the art of governing people in our society. We
must not understand the exercise of power as pure violence or strict
coercion. Power consists in complex relations: these relations involve a
set of rational techniques, and the efficiency of those techniques is
due to a subtle integration of coerciontechnologies and self-
technologies. I think that we have to get rid of the more or less
Freudian schema--you know it--the schema of interiorization of the law
by the self. Fortunately, from a theoretical point of view, and maybe
unfortunately from a practical point of view, things are much more
complicated than that. In short, having studied the field of government
by taking as my point of departure techniques of domination, I would
like in years to come to study government--especially in the field of
sexuality--starting from the techniques of the self. [14]
Among those techniques of the self in this field of the self-technology,
I think that the techniques oriented toward the discovery and the
formulation of the truth concerning oneself are extremely important; and,
if for the government of people in our societies everyone had not only
to obey but also to produce and publish the truth about oneself, then
examination of conscience and confession are among the most important of
those procedures. Of course, there is a very long and very complex
history, from the Delphic precept, gnothi seauton ("know yourself") to
the strange therapeutics promoted by Leuret, about which I was speaking
in the beginning of this lecture. There is a very long way from one to
the other, and I don't want, of course, to give you even a survey this
evening. I'd like only to underline a transformation of those practices,
a transformation which took place at the beginning of the Christian era,
of the Christian period, when the ancient obligation of knowing oneself
became the monastic precept "confess, to your spiritual guide, each of
your thoughts." This transformation is, I think, of some importance in
the genealogy of modern subjectivity. With this transformation starts
what we would call the hermeneutics of the self. This evening I'll try
to outline the way confession and self-examination were conceived by
pagan philosophers, and next week I'll try to show you what it became in
the early Christianity.
It is well known that the main objective of the Greek schools of
philosophy did not consist of the elaboration, the teaching, of theory.
The goal of the Greek schools of philosophy was the transformation of
the individual. The goal of the Greek philosophy was to give the
individual the quality which would permit him to live differently,
better, more happily, than other people. What place did the self-
examination and the confession have in this? At first glance, in all the
ancient philosophical practices, the obligation to tell the truth about
oneself occupies a rather restrained place. And this for two reasons,
both of which remain valid throughout the whole Greek and Hellenistic
Antiquity. The first of those reasons is that the objective of
philosophical training was to arm the individual with a certain number
of precepts which permit him to conduct himself in all circumstances of
life without his losing mastery of himself or without losing tranquility
of spirit, purity of body and soul. From this principle stems the
importance of the master's discourse. The master's discourse has to talk,
to explain, to persuade; he has to give the disciple a universal code
for all his life, so that the verbalization takes place on the side of
the master and not on the side of the disciple.
There is also another reason why the obligation to confess does not have
a lot of importance in the direction of the antique conscience. The tie
with the master was then circumstantial or, in any case, provisional. It
was a relationship between two wills, which does not imply a complete or
a definitive obedience. One solicits or one accepts the advice of a
master or of a friend in order to endure an ordeal, a bereavement, an
exile, or a reversal of fortune, and so on. Or again, one places oneself
under the direction of a master for a certain time of one's life so as
one day to be able to behave autonomously and no longer have need of
advice. Ancient direction tends toward the autonomy of the directed. In
these conditions, one can understand that the necessity for exploring
oneself in exhaustive depth does not present itself. It is not
indispensable to say everything about oneself, to reveal one's least
secrets, so that the master may exert complete power over one. The
exhaustive and continual presentation of oneself under the eyes of an
all powerful director is not an essential feature in this technique of
direction.
But, despite this general orientation which has so little emphasis on
self-examination and on confession, one finds well before Christianity
already elaborated techniques for discovering and formulating the truth
about oneself. And their role, it would seem, became more and more
important. The growing importance of these techniques is no doubt tied
to the development of communal life in the philosophical school, as with
the Pythagoreans or the Epicureans, and it is also tied to the value
accorded to the medical model, either in the Epicurean or the Stoician
schools.
Since it is not possible in so short a time even to give a sketch of
this evolution of Greek and Hellenist civilization, I'll take only two
passages of a Roman philosopher, Seneca. They may be considered as
rather good witnesses on the practice of self-examination and confession
as it existed with the Stoics of the Imperial period at the time of the
birth of Christianity. The first passage is to be found in the De Ira of
Seneca. Here is the passage; I'll read it to you:
What could be more beautiful than to conduct an inquest on one's
day? What sleep better than that which follows this review of
one's actions? How calm it is, deep and free, when the soul has
received its portion of praise and blame, and has submitted itself
to its own examination, to its own censure. Secretly, it makes the
trial of its own conduct. I exercise this authority over myself,
and each day I will myself as witness before myself When my light
is lowered and my wife at last is silent, I reason with myself and
take the measure of my acts and of my words. I hide nothing from
myself; I spare myself nothing. Why, in effect, should I fear
anything at all from amongst my errors whilst I can say: "Be
vigilant in not beginning it again; today I will forgive you. In a
certain discussion you spoke too aggressively or you did not
correct the person you were reproaching, you offended him, . . . "
etc.[15]
There is something paradoxical in seeing the Stoics, such as Seneca and
also Sextus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and so on, according so much
importance to the examination of conscience whilst, according to the
terms of their doctrine, all faults were supposed equal. It should not
therefore be necessary to interrogate themselves on each one of them.
But, let's look at this text a little more closely. First of all, Seneca
employs a vocabulary which at first glance appears, above all, judicial.
He uses expressions like cognoscere de moribus suds, and me causam dico--
all that is typical judicial vocabulary. It seems, therefore, that the
subject is, with regard to himself, both the judge and the accused. In
this examination of conscience it seems that the subject divides itself
in two and organizes a judicial scene, where it plays both roles at
once. Seneca is like an accused confessing his crime to the judge, and
the judge is Seneca himself. But, if we look more closely, we see that
the vocabulary used by Seneca is much more administrative than judicial.
It is the vocabulary of the direction of goods or territory. Seneca says,
for instance, that he is speculator sui, that he inspects himself, that
he examines with himself the past day, totum diem meum scrutor; or that
he takes the measure of things said and done; he uses the word remetior.
With regard to himself, he is not a judge who has to punish; he is,
rather, an administrator who, once the work has been done or the year's
business finished, does the accounts, takes stock of things, and sees if
everything has been done correctly. Seneca is a permanent administrator
of himself, more than a judge of his own past.[16]
The examples of the faults committed by Seneca and with which he
reproaches himself are significant from this point of view. He says and
he reproaches himself for having criticized someone and instead of
correcting him has hurt him; or again, he says that he has discussed
with people who were in any case incapable of understanding him. These
faults, as he says himself, are not really faults; they are mistakes.
And why mistakes? Either because he did not have in his mind the aims
which the sage should set himself or because he had not applied in the
correct manner the rules of conduct to be deduced from them. The faults
are mistakes in that sense that they are bad adjustments between aims
and means. Significant is also the fact that Seneca does not recall
those faults in order to punish himself; he has as a goal only to
memorize exactly the rules which he had to apply. This memorization has
for an object a reactivation of fundamental philosophical principles and
the readjustment of their application. In the Christian confession the
penitent has to memorize the law in order to discover his own sins, but
in this Stoic exercise the sage has to memorize acts in order to
reactivate the fundamental rules.
One can therefore characterize this examination in a few words. First,
this examination, it's not at all a question of discovering the truth
hidden in the subject. It is rather a question of recalling the truth
forgotten by the subject. Two, what the subject forgets is not himself,
nor his nature, nor his origin, nor a supernatural affinity. What the
subject forgets is what he ought to have done, that is, a collection of
rules of conduct that he had learned. Three, the recollection of errors
committed during the day serves to measure the distance which separates
what has been done from what should have been done. And four, the
subject who practices this examination on himself is not the operating
ground for a process more or less obscure which has to be deciphered. He
is the point where rules of conduct come together and register
themselves in the form of memories. He is at the same time the point of
departure for actions more or less in conformity with these rules. He
constitutes, the subject constitutes, the point of intersection between
a set of memories which must be brought into the present and acts which
have to be regulated.
This evening examination has its logical place among a set of other
Stoic exercises[17]: continual reading, for instance, of the manual of
precepts (that's for the present); the examination of the evils which
could happen in life, the well-known premeditatio malorum (that was for
the possible); the enumeration each morning of the tasks to be
accomplished during the day (that was for the future); and finally, the
evening examination of conscience (so much for the past). As you see,
the self in all those exercises is not considered as a field of
subjective data which have to be interpreted. It submits itself to the
trial of possible or real action.
Well, after this examination of conscience, which constitutes a kind of
confession to one's self, I would like to speak about the confession to
others: I mean to say the expose of one's soul which one makes to
someone, who may be a friend, an adviser, a guide. This was a practice
not very developed in philosophical life, but it had been developed in
some philosophical schools, for instance among the Epicurean schools,
and it was also a very well known medical practice. The medical
literature is rich in such examples of confession or expose of the self.
For instance, the treatise of Galen On the Passions of the Soul'[18]
quotes an example like that; or Plutarch, in the De Profectibus in
Virtute writes, "There are many sick people who accept medicine and
others who refuse them; the man who hides the shame of soul, his desire,
his unpleasantness, his avarice, his concupiscence, has little chance
of making progress. Indeed, to speak one's evil reveals one['s]
nastiness; to recognize it instead of taking pleasure in hiding it. All
this is a sign of progress."[19]
Well, another text of Seneca might also serve us as an example here of
what was confession in the Late Antiquity. It is in the beginning of De
Tranquillitate Animi.[20] Serenus, a young friend of Seneca, comes to
ask him for advice. It is very explicitly a medical consultation on his
own state of soul. "Why," says Serenus, "should I not confess to you
the truth, as to a doctor? . . . I do not feel altogether ill but nor
do I feel entirely in good health." Serenus feels himself in a state of
malaise, rather as he says, like on a boat which does not advance, but
is tossed about by the rolling of the ship. And, he fears staying at sea
in this condition, in view of firm land and of the virtues which remain
inaccessible. In order to escape this state, Serenus therefore decides
to consult Seneca and to confess his state to Seneca. He says that he
wants verum fateri, to tell the truth, to Seneca.[21]
Now what is this truth, what is this verum, that he wants to confess?
Does he confess faults, secret thoughts, shameful desires, and things
like that? Not at all. The text of Serenus appears as an accumulation of
relatively unimportant, at least for us unimportant, details; for
instance, Serenus confesses to Seneca that he uses the earthenware
inherited from his father, that he gets easily carried away when he
makes public speeches, and so on and so on. But, it is easy, beneath
this apparent disorder, to recognize three distinct domains for this
confession: the domain of riches, the domain of political life, and the
domain of glory; to acquire riches, to participate in the affairs of the
city, to gain public opinion. These are--these were--the three types of
activity possible for a free man, the three commonplace moral questions
that are asked by the major philosophical schools of the period. The
framework of the expose of Serenus is not therefore defined by the real
course of his existence; it is not defined by his real experiences, nor
by a theory of the soul or of its elements, but only by a classification
of the different types of activity which one can exercise and the ends
which one can pursue. In each one of these fields, Serenus reveals his
attitude by enumerating that which pleases him and that which displeases
him. The expression "it pleases me" (places me) is the leading thread in
his analysis. It pleases him to do favors for his friends. It pleases
him to eat simply, and to have not other than that which he has
inherited, but the spectacle of luxury in others pleases him. He takes
pleasure also in inflating his oratorical style with the hope that
posterity will retain his words. In thus exposing what pleases him,
Serenus is not seeking to reveal what are his profound desires. His
pleasures are not the means of revealing what Christians later call
concupiscensia. For him, it is a question of his own state and of adding
something to the knowledge of the moral precepts. This addition to what
is already known is a force, the force which would be able to transform
pure knowledge and simple consciousness in a real way of living. And
that is what Seneca tries to do when he uses a set of persuasive
arguments, demonstrations, examples, in order not to discover a still
unknown truth inside and in the depth of Serenus's soul but in order to
explain, if I may say, to which extent truth in general is true.
Seneca's discourse has for an objective not to add to some theoretical
principle a force of coercion coming from elsewhere but to transform
them in a victorious force. Seneca has to give a place to truth as a
force.
Hence, I think, several consequences. First, in this game between
Serenus's confession and Seneca's consultation, truth, as you see, is
not defined by a correspondence to reality but as a force inherent to
principles and which has to be developed in a discourse. Two, this truth
is not something which is hidden behind or under the consciousness in
the deepest and most obscure part of the soul. It is something which is
before the individual as a point of attraction, a kind of magnetic force
which attracts him towards a goal. Three, this truth is not obtained by
an analytical exploration of what is supposed to be real in the
individual but by rhetorical explanation of what is good for anyone who
wants to approach the life of a sage. Four, the confession is not
oriented toward an individualization of Serenus by the discovery of some
personal characteristics but towards the constitution of a self which
could be at the same time and without any discontinuity subject of
knowledge and subject of will. Five,[22] we can see that such a practice
of confession and consultation remains within the framework of what the
Greeks for a long time called the gnome. The term gnome' designates the
unity of will and knowledge; it designates also a brief piece of
discourse through which truth appeared with all its force and encrusts
itself in the soul of people.[23] Then, we could say that even as late
as the first century A.D., the type of subject which is proposed as a
model and as a target in the Greek, or in the Hellenistic or Roman,
philosophy, is a gnomic self, where force of the truth is one with the
form of the will.
In this model of the gnomic self, we found several constitutive
elements: the necessity of telling truth about oneself, the role of the
master and the master's discourse, the long way that leads finally to
the emergence of the self. All those elements, we find them also in the
Christian technologies of the self, but with a very different
organization. I should say, in sum, and I'll conclude there, that as far
as we followed the practices of self-examination and confession in the
Hellenistic or Roman philosophy, you see that the self is not something
that has to be discovered or deciphered as a very obscure text. You see
that the task is not to put in the light what would be the most obscure
part of our selves. The self has, on the contrary, not to be discovered
but to be constituted, to be constituted through the force of truth.
This force lies in[24] the rhetorical quality of the master's discourse,
and this rhetorical quality depends for a part on the expose of the
disciple, who has to explain how far he is in his way of living from
the true principles that he knows.[25] And I think that this
organization of the self as a target, the organization of what I call
the gnomic self, as the objective, the aim, towards which the
confession and the self-examination is oriented, is something deeply
different of what we meet in the Christian technologies of the self. In
the Christian technologies of the self, the problem is to discover what
is hidden inside the self; the self is like a text or like a book that
we have to decipher, and not something which has to be constructed by
the superposition, the superimposition, of the will and the truth. This
organization, this Christian organization, so different from the pagan
one, is something which is I think quite decisive for the genealogy of
the modern self, and that's the point I'll try to explain next week
when we meet again. Thank you.
CHRISTIANITY AND CONFESSION
The theme of this lecture is the same as the theme of last week's
lecture.[26] The theme is: how was formed in our societies what I would
like to call the interpretive analysis of the self; or, how was formed
the hermeneutics of the self in the modern, or at least in the Christian
and the modern, societies? In spite of the fact that we can find very
early in the Greek, in the Hellenistic, in the Latin cultures,
techniques such as self-examination and confession, I think that there
are very large differences between the Latin and Greek--the Classical--
techniques of the self and the techniques developed in Christianity. And
I'll try to show this evening that the modern hermeneutics of the self
is rooted much more in those Christian techniques than in the Classical
ones. The gnothi seauton is, I think, much less influential in our
societies, in our culture, than is supposed to be.
As everybody knows, Christianity is a confession. That means that
Christianity belongs to a very special type of religion, the religions
which impose on those who practice them obligation of truth. Such
obligations in Christianity are numerous; for instance, a Christian has
the obligation to hold as true a set of propositions which constitutes a
dogma; or, he has the obligation to hold certain books as a permanent
source of truth; or,[27] he has the obligation to accept the decisions
of certain authorities in matters of truth.[28]
But Christianity requires another form of truth obligation quite
different from those I just mentioned. Everyone, every Christian, has
the duty to know who he is, what is happening in him. He has to know
the faults he may have committed: he has to know the temptations to
which he is exposed. And, moreover, everyone in Christianity is obliged
to say these things to other people, to tell these things to other
people, and hence, to bear witness against himself.
A few remarks. These two ensembles of obligations, those regarding the
faith, the book, the dogma, and the obligations regarding the self, the
soul, the heart, are linked together. A Christian is always supposed to
be supported by the light of faith if he wants to explore himself, and,
conversely, access to the truth of the faith cannot be conceived of
without the purification of the soul. As Augustine said, in a Latin
formula I'm sure you'll understand, qui facit veritatem venit ad lucem.
That means: facite veritatem, "to make truth inside oneself," and venire
ad lucem, "to get access to the light." Well, to make truth inside of
oneself, and to get access to the light of God, and so on, those two
processes are strongly connected in the Christian experience. But those
two relationships to truth, you can find them equally connected, as you
know, in Buddhism, and they were also connected in all the Gnostic
movements of the first centuries. But there, either in Buddhism or in
the Gnostic movements, those two relationships to truth were connected
in such a way that they were almost identified. To discover the truth
inside oneself, to decipher the real nature and the authentic origin of
the soul, was considered by the Gnosticists as one thing with coming
through to the light.[29]
On the contrary, one of the main characteristics of orthodox
Christianity, one of the main differences between Christianity and
Bud&ism, or between Christianity and Gnosticism, one of the main reasons
for the mistrust of Christianity toward mystics, and one of the most
constant historical features of Christianity, is that those two systems
of obligation, of truth obligation--the one concerned with access to
light and the one concerned with the making of truth, the discovering of
truth inside oneself--those two systems of obligation have always
maintained a relative autonomy. Even after Luther, even in Protestantism,
the secrets of the soul and the mysteries of the faith, the self and the
book, are not in Christianity enlightened by exactly the same type of
light. They demand different methods and put into operation particular
techniques.
Well, let's put aside the long history of their complex and often
conflictual relations before and after the Reformation. I'd like this
evening to focus attention on the second of those two systems of
obligation. I'd like to focus on the obligation imposed on every
Christian to manifest the truth about himself. When one speaks of
confession and self-examination in Christianity, one of course has in
mind the sacrament of penance and the canonic confession of sins. But
these are rather late innovations in Christianity. Christians of the
first centuries knew completely different forms for the showing forth of
the truth about themselves, and you'll find these obligations of
manifesting the truth about oneself in two different institutions--in
penitential rites and monastic life. And I would like first to examine
the penitential rites and the obligations of truth, the truth
obligations which are related, which are connected with those
penitential rites. I will not enter, of course, into the discussions
which have taken place and which continue until now as to the
progressive development of these rites. I would like only to underline
one fundamental fact: in the first centuries of Christianity, penance
was not an act. Penance, in the first centuries of Christianity, penance
is a status, which presents several characteristics. The function of
this status is to avoid the definitive expulsion from the church of a
Christian who has committed one or several serious sins. As penitent,
this Christian is excluded from many of the ceremonies and collective
rites, but he does not cease to be a Christian, and by means of this
status he can obtain his reintegration. And this status is therefore a
long-term affair. This status affects most aspects of his life--fasting
obligations, rules about clothing, interdictions on sexual relations--
and the individual is marked to such an extent by this status that even
after his reconciliation, after his reintegration in the community, he
will still suffer from a certain number of prohibitions (for instance,
he will not be able to become a priest). So penance is not an act
corresponding to a sin; it is a status, a general status in the
existence.
Now, amongst the elements of this status, the obligation to manifest the
truth is fundamental. I don't say that enunciation of sins is
fundamental; I employ a much more imprecise and obscure expression. I
say that manifestation of the truth is necessary and is deeply connected
with this status of penance. In fact, to designate the truth games or
the truth obligations inherent to penitents, the Greek fathers used a
word, a very specific word (and very enigmatic also); the word
exomologesis. This word was so specific that even Latin writers, Latin
fathers, often used the Greek word without even translating it.[30]
What does this term exomologesis mean? In a very general sense, the word
refers to the recognition of an act, but more precisely, in the
penitential rite, what was the exomologesis? Well, at the end of the
penitential procedure, at the end and not at the beginning, at the end
of the penitential procedure, when the moment of the reintegration came,
an episode took place which the texts regularly call exomologesis. Some
descriptions are very early and some very late, but they are quite
identical. Tertullian, for instance, at the end of the second century,
describes the ceremony in the following manner. He wrote, "The penitent
wears a hair shirt and ashes. He is wretchedly dressed. He is taken by
the hand and led into the church. He prostrates himself before the
widows and the priest. He hangs on the skirts of their garments. He
kisses their knees."[31] And much later after this, in the beginning of
the fifth century, Jerome described in the same way the penitence of
Fabiola. Fabiola was a woman, a well-known Roman noblewoman, who had
married a second time before the death of her first husband, which was
something quite bad, and she then was obliged to do penance. And Jerome
describes thus this penance: "During the days which preceded Easter,"
which was the moment of the reconciliation.
during the days which preceded Easter, Fabiola was to be found
among the ranks of the penitents. The bishop, the priests, and the
people wept with her. Her hair disheveled, her face pale, her
hands dirty, her head covered in ashes, she chastened her naked
breast and the face with which she had seduced her second husband.
She revealed to all her wound, and Rome, in tears, contemplated
the scars on her emaciated body.[32]
No doubt Jerome and Tertullian were liable to be rather carried away by
such things; however, in Ambrose and in others one finds indications
which show clearly the existence of an episode of dramatic self-
revelation at the moment of the reconciliation of the penitent. That was,
specifically, the exomologesis.
But the term of exomologesis does not apply only to this final episode.
Frequently the word examologesis is used to designate everything that
the penitent does to obtain his reconciliation during the time in which
he retains the status of penitent. The acts by which he punishes himself
must be indissociable from the acts by which he reveals himself. The
punishment of oneself and the voluntary expression of oneself are bound
together.
A correspondent of Cyprian in the middle of the third century writes,
for instance, that those who wish to do penance must, I quote, "prove
their suffering, show their shame, make visible their humility, and
exhibit their modesty."[33] And, in the Paraenesis, Pacian says that the
true penance is accomplished not in a nominal fashion but finds its
instruments in sackcloth, ashes, fasting, affliction, and the
participation of a great number of people in prayers. In a few words,
penance in the first Christian centuries is a way of life acted out at
all times out of an obligation to show oneself. And that is, exactly,
exomologesis.[34]
As you see, this exornologesis did not obey to a judicial principle of
correlation, of exact correlation, adjusting the punishment to the
crime. Exomologesis obeyed a law of dramatic emphasis and of maximum
theatricality. And, neither did-this exomologesis obey a truth principle
of correspondence between verbal enunciation and reality. As you see, no
description in this exomologesis is of a penance; no confession, no
verbal enumeration of sins, no analysis of the sins, but somatic
expressions and symbolic expressions. Fabiola did not confess her fault,
telling to somebody what she has done, but she put under everybody's
eyes the flesh, the body, which has committed the sin. And,
paradoxically, the exomologesis is this time to rub out the sin,
restitute the previous purity acquired by baptism, and this by showing
the sinner as he is in his reality--dirty, defiled, sullied.[35]
Tertullian has a word to translate the Greek word exomologesis; he said
it was publicatio sui, the Christian had to publish himself.[36] Publish
oneself, that means that he has two things to do. One has to show
oneself as a sinner; that means, as somebody who, choosing the path of
the sin, preferred filthiness to purity, earth and dust to heaven,
spiritual poverty to the treasures of faith. In a word, he has to show
himself as somebody who preferred spiritual death to earthen life. And
that was the reason why exomologesis was a kind of representation of
death. It was the theatrical representation of the sinner as dead or as
dying. But this exomologesis was also a way for the sinner to express
his will to get free from this world, to get rid of his own body, to
destroy his own flesh, and get access to a new spiritual life. It is the
theatrical representation of the sinner as willing his own death as a
sinner. It is the dramatic manifestation of the renunciation to oneself.
To justify this exomologesis and this renunciation to oneself in
manifesting the truth about oneself, Christian fathers had recourse to
several models. The well-known medical model was very often used in
pagan philosophy: one has to show his wounds to the physicians if he
wants to be healed. They also used the judicial model: one always
appeases the court when spontaneously confessing the faults.[37] But the
most important model to justify the necessity of exomologesis is the
model of martyrdom. The martyr is he who prefers to face death rather
than to abandon his faith.[38] The sinner abandons the faith in order to
keep the life of here below; he will be reinstated only if in his turn
he exposes himself voluntarily to a sort of martyrdom to which all will
be witnesses, and which is penance, or penance as exomologesis.[39] Such
a demonstration does not therefore have as its function the
establishment of the personal identity. Rather, such a demonstration
serves to mark this dramatic demonstration of what one is: the refusal
of the self, the breaking off from one's self. One recalls what was the
objective of Stoic technology: it was to superimpose, as I tried to
explain to you last week, the subject of knowledge and the subject of
will by means of the perpetual rememorizing of the rules. The formula
which is at the heart of exomologesis is, in contrary, ego non sum ego.
The exomologesis seeks, in opposition to the Stoic techniques, to
superimpose by an act of violent rupture the truth about oneself and the
renunciation of oneself. In the ostentatious gestures of maceration,
self-revelation in examologesis is, at the same time, self-destruction.
Well, if we turn to the confession in monastic institutions, it is of
course quite different from this exomologesis. In the Christian
institutions of the first centuries another form of confession is to be
found, very different from this one. It is the organized confession in
the monastic communities. In a certain way, this confession is close to
the exercise practiced in the pagan schools of philosophy. There is
nothing astonishing in this, since the monastic life presented itself as
the true form of philosophical life, and the monastery was presented as
the school of philosophy. There is an obvious transfer of several
technologies of the self in Christian spirituality from practices of
pagan philosophy.
Concerning this continuity I'll quote only one witness, John Chrysostom,
who describes an examination of conscience which has exactly the same
form, the same shape, the same administrative character, as that
described by Seneca in the De Ira and which I spoke about last week.
John Chrysostom says, and you'll recognize exactly (well, nearly) the
same words as in Seneca. Chrysostom writes,
It is in the morning that we must take account of our expenses,
then it is in the evening, after our meal, when we have gone to
bed and no one troubles us and disquiets us, that we must ask
ourselves to render account of our conduct to ourselves. Let us
examine what is to our advantage and what is prejudicial. Let us
cease spending inappropriately and try to set aside useful funds
in the place of harmful expenses, prayers in place of indiscrete
words.[40]
You'll recognize exactly the same administrative self-examination you
could find last week with Seneca. But these kinds of ancient practices
were modified under the influence of two fundamental elements of
Christian spirituality: the principle of obedience, and the principle of
contemplation. First, the principle of obedience--we have seen that in
the ancient schools of philosophy the relationship between the master
and the disciple was, if I may say, instrumental and provisory. The
obedience of the disciple was founded on the capacity of the master to
lead him to a happy and autonomous life. For a long series of reasons
that I haven't time to discus here, obedience has very different
features in the monastic life and above all, of course, in the cenobite
communities. Obedience in the monastic institutions must bear on all the
aspects of life; there is an adage, very well known in the monastic
literature, which says, "everything that one does not do on order of
one's director, or everything that one does without his permission,
constitute a theft." Therefore, obedience is a permanent relationship,
and even when the monk is old, even when he became, in his turn, a
master, even then he has to keep the spirit of obedience as a permanent
sacrifice of his own will.
Another feature distinguishes monastic discipline from the philosophical
life. In the monastic life, the supreme good is not the mastership of
oneself; the supreme good in the monastic life is the contemplation of
God. The obligation of the monk is continuously to turn his thoughts to
that single point which is God, and his obligation is also to make sure
that his heart, his soul, and the eye of his soul is pure enough to see
God and to receive light from him.
Placed under this principle of obedience, and oriented towards the
objective of contemplation, you understand that the technology of the
self which develops in Christian monasticism presents peculiar
characteristics. John Cassian's lnstitutiones and Collationes give a
rather systematic and clear expose of self-examination and of the
confession as they were practiced among the Palestinian and Egyptian
monks.[41] And I'll follow several of the indications you can find in
those two books, which were written in the beginning of the fifth
century. First, about the self-examination, the first point about the
self-examination in the monastic life is that the self-examination in
this kind of Christian exercise is much more concerned with thoughts
than with actions. Since he has to turn his thought continuously towards
God, you understand very well that the monk has to take in hand not the
course of his actions, as the Stoic philosopher; he has to take in hand
the course of his thoughts. Not only the passions which might make
vacillate the firmness of his conduct; he has to take in hand the images
which present themselves to the spirit, the thoughts which come to
interfere with contemplation, the diverse suggestions which turn the
attention of the spirit away from its object, that means away from God.
So much so that the primary material for scrutiny and for the
examination of the self is an area anterior to actions, of course,
anterior to will also, even an area anterior to the desires--a much more
tenacious material than the material the Stoic philosopher had to
examine in himself. The monk has to examine a material which the Greek
fathers call (almost always pejoratively) the logismoi, that is in Latin,
cogitationes, the nearly imperceptible movements of the thoughts, the
permanent mobility of soul.[42] That's the material which the monk has
to continuously examine in order to maintain the eye of his spirit
always directed towards the unique point which is God. But, when the
monk scrutinizes his own thoughts, what is he concerned with? Not of
course with the relation between the idea and the reality. He is not
concerned with this truth relation which makes an idea wrong or true. He
is not interested in the relationship between his mind and the external
world. What he is concerned with is the nature the quality, the
substance of his thoughts.
We must, I think, pause for a moment on this important point. In order
to make comprehensible what this permanent examination consists in,
Cassian uses three comparisons. He uses first the comparison of the
mill. Thought, says Cassian, thought is like a millstone which grinds
the grains. The grains are of course the ideas which present
continuously themselves in the mind. And in the comparison of the
millstone, it is up to the miller to sort out amongst the grains those
which are bad and those which can be admitted to the millstone because
they are good. Cassian has recourse also to the comparison of the
officer who has the soldiers file past him and makes them pass to the
right or to the left, allotting to each his task according to his
capacities. And lastly, and that I think is the most important, the most
interesting, Cassian says that one must be with respect to oneself like
a moneychanger to whom one presents coins, and whose task consists in
examining them, verifying their authenticity, so as to accept those
which are authentic whilst rejecting those which are not. Cassian
develops this comparison at length. When a moneychanger examines a coin,
says Cassian, the moneychanger looks at the effigy the money bears, he
considers the metal of which it is made, to know what it is and if it is
pure. The moneychanger seeks to know the workshop from which it comes,
and he weighs it in his hand in order to know if it has been filed down
or ill-used. In the same way, says Cassian, one must verify the quality
of one's thoughts, one must know if they really bear the effigy of God;
that is to say, if they really permit us to contemplate him, if their
surface brilliance does not hide the impurity of a bad thought. What is
their origin? Do they come from God, or from the workshop of the demon?
Finally, even if they are of good quality and origin, have they not been
whittled away and rusted by evil sentiments?
I think that this form of examination is at the same time new and
historically important. Perhaps I have insisted a little too much with
regard to the Stoics on the fact that their examination, the Stoic
examination, was concerned with acts and rules. One must recognize,
however, the importance of the question of truth with the Stoic, but the
question was presented in terms of true or false opinions favorable to
forming good or bad actions. For Cassian, the problem is not to know if
there is a conformity between the idea and the order of external things;
it is a question of examining the thought in itself. Does it really show
its true origin, is it as pure as it seems, have not foreign elements
insidiously mixed themselves with it? Altogether, the question is not
"Am I wrong to think such a thing?" but "Have I not been deceived by the
thought which has come to me?" Is the thought which comes to me, and
independently of the truth as to the things it represents, is there not
an illusion about myself on my part? For instance, the idea comes to me
that fasting is a good thing. The idea is certainly true, but maybe this
idea has been suggested not by God but by Satan in order to put me in
competition with other monks, and then bad feelings about the other ones
can be mixed to the project of fasting more than I do. So, the idea is
true in regard to the external world, or in regard to the rules, but the
idea is impure since from its origin it is rooted in bad sentiments. And
we have to decipher our thoughts as subjective data which have to be
interpreted, which have to be scrutinized, in their roots and in their
origins.
It is impossible not to be struck by the similarity of this general
theme, and the similarity of this image of the moneychanger, and several
texts of Freud about censorship. One could say that Freudian censorship
is both the same thing and the reverse of Cassian's changer; both the
Cassian changer and the Freudian censorship have to control the access
to consciousness-- they have to let some representations in and to
reject the others. But Cassian's changer has for a function to decipher
what is false or illusory in what presents itself to consciousness and
then to let in only what is authentic. For that purpose the Cassian
moneychanger uses a specific aptitude that the Latin fathers called
discretio.[43] The Freudian censorship is, compared to the Cassian
changer, both more perverse and more naive. The Freudian censorship
rejects that what presents itself as it is, and the Freudian censorship
accepts that what is sufficiently disguised. Cassian's changer is a
truth-operator through discretio; Freudian censorship is a falsehood-
operator through symbolization. But I don't want to go further in such a
parallel; it's only an indication, but I think that the relations
between Freudian practice and the Christian techniques of spirituality
could be, if seriously done, a very interesting field of research.[44]
But we have to go further, for the problem is, how is it possible to
perform, as Cassian wishes, how is it possible to perform continuously
this necessary self-examination, this necessary self-control of the
tiniest movements in the thoughts? How is it possible to perform this
necessary hermeneutics of our own thoughts? The answer given by Cassian
and his inspirators is both obvious and surprising. The answer given by
Cassian is, well, you interpret your thoughts by telling them to the
master or to your spiritual father. You interpret your thoughts by
confessing not of course your acts, not confessing your faults, but in
confessing continuously the movement you can notice in your thought. Why
is this confession able to assume this hermeneutical role? One reason
comes to the mind: in exposing the movements of his heart, the disciple
permits his seigneur to know those movements and, thanks to his greater
experience, to his greater wisdom, the seigneur, the spiritual father,
can better understand what's happening. His seniority permits him to
distinguish between truth and illusion in the soul of the person,he
directs.
But that is not the principal reason that Cassian invokes to explain the
necessity of confession. There is for Cassian a specific virtue of
verification in this act of verbalization. Amongst all the examples that
Cassian quotes there is one which is particularly enlightening on this
point. Cassian quotes the following anecdote: a young monk, Serapion,
incapable of enduring the obligatory fast, stole every evening a loaf of
bread. But of course he did not dare to confess it to his spiritual
director, and one day this spiritual director, who no doubt guessed all,
gives a public sermon on the necessity of being truthful. Convinced by
this sermon, the young Serapion takes out from under his robe the bread
that he has stolen and shows it to everyone. Then he prostrates himself
and confesses the secret of his daily meal, and then, not at the moment
when he showed the bread he has stolen, but at the very moment when he
confesses, verbally confesses, the secret of his daily meal, at this
very moment of the confession, a light seems to tear itself away from
his body and cross the room, in spreading a disgusting smell of sulphur.
One sees that in this anecdote the decisive element is not that the
master knows the truth. It is not even that the young monk reveals his
act and restores the object of his theft. It is the confession, the
verbal act of confession, which comes last and which makes appear, in a
certain sense, by its own mechanics, the truth, the reality of what has
happened. The verbal act of confession is the proof, is the
manifestation, of truth. Why? Well, I think it is because what marks the
difference between good and evil thoughts, following Cassian, is that
the evil ones cannot be referred to without difficulty. If one blushes
in recounting them, if one seeks to hide his own thoughts, if even quite
simply one hesitates to tell his thoughts, that is the proof that those
thoughts are not good as they may appear. Evil inhabits them. Thus
verbalization constitutes a way of sorting out thoughts which present
themselves. One can test their value according to whether they resist
verbalization or not. Cassian gives the reason of this resistance: Satan
as principle of evil is incompatible with the light, and he resists when
confession drags him from the dark caverns of the conscience into the
light of explicit discourse. I quote Cassian: "A bad thought brought
into the light of day immediately loses its veneer. The terrible serpent
that this confession has forced out of its subterranean lair, to throw
it out into the light and make its shame a public spectacle, is quick to
beat a retreat."[45] Does that mean that it would be sufficient for the
monk to tell his thoughts aloud even when alone? Of course not. The
presence of somebody, even if he does not speak, even if it is a silent
presence, this presence is requested for this kind of confession,
because the abbe', or the brother, or the spiritual father, who listens
at this confession is the image of God. And the verbalization of
thoughts is a way to put under the eyes of God all the ideas, images,
suggestions, as they come to consciousness, and under this divine light
they show necessarily what they are.
>From this, we can see (1) that verbalization in itself has an
interpretive function. Verbalization contains in itself a power of
discretio.[46] (2) This verbalization is not a kind of retrospection
about past acts. Verbalization, Cassian imposes to monks, this
verbalization has to be a permanent activity, as contemporaneous as
possible of the stream of thoughts. (3) This verbalization must go as
deep as possible in the depth of the thoughts. These, whatever they are,
have an inapparent origin, obscure roots, secret parts, and the role of
verbalization is to excavate these origins and those secret parts. (4)
As verbalization brings to the external light the deep movement of the
thought, it leads also and by the same process the human soul from the
reign of Satan to the law of God. That means that verbalization is a way
for the conversion[47] (for the metanoia, said the Greek fathers), for
the conversion to develop itself and to take effect. Since under the
reign of Satan the human being was attached to himself, verbalization as
a movement toward God is a renunciation to Satan, and a renunciation to
oneself. Verbalization is a self-sacrifice. To this permanent,
exhaustive, and sacrificial verbalization of the thoughts which was
obligatory for the monks in the monastic institution, to this permanent
verbalization of the thoughts, the Greek fathers gave the name of
exagoreusis.[48]
Thus, as you see, in the Christianity of the first centuries, the
obligation to tell the truth about oneself was to take two major forms,
the exomologesis and the exagoreusis, and as you see they are very
different from one another. On the one hand, the exomologesis is a
dramatic expression by the penitent of his status of sinner, and this in
a kind of public manifestation. On the other hand, the exagoreusis, we
have an analytical and continuous verbalization of the thoughts, and in
this relation of complete obedience to the will of the spiritual father.
But it must be remarked that this verbalization, as I just told you, is
also a way of renouncing self and no longer wishing to be the subject of
the will. Thus the rule of confession in exagoreusis, this rule of
permanent verbalization, finds its parallel in the model of martyrdom
which haunts exomologesis. The ascetic maceration exercised on the body
and the rule of permanent verbalization applied to the thoughts, the
obligation to macerate the body and the obligation of verbalizing the
thoughts--those things are deeply and closely related. They are supposed
to have the same goals and the same effect. So much that one can isolate
as the common element to both practices the following principle: the
revelation of the truth about oneself cannot, in those two early
Christian experiences, the revelation of the truth about oneself cannot
be dissociated from the obligation to renounce oneself. We have to
sacrifice the self in order to discover the truth about ourself, and we
have to discover the truth about ourself in order to sacrifice ourself.
Truth and sacrifice, the truth about ourself and the sacrifice of
ourself, are deeply and closely connected. And we have to understand
this sacrifice not only as a radical change in the way of life but as
the consequence of a formula like this: you will become the subject of
the manifestation of truth when and only when you disappear or you
destroy yourself as a real body or as a real existence.
Let's stop here. I have been both too long and much too schematic. I
would like you to consider what I have said only as a point of departure,
one of those small origins that Nietzsche liked to discover at the
beginning of great things. The great things that those monastic
practices announced are numerous. I will mention, just before I finish,
a few of them. First, as you see, the apparition of a new kind of self,
or at least a new kind of relationship to our selves. You remember what
I told you last week: the Greek technology, or the philosophical
techniques, of the self tended to produce a self which could be, which
should be, the permanent superposition in the form of memory of the
subject of knowledge and the subject of the will.[49]
I think that in Christianity we see the development of a much more
complex technology of the self. This technology of the self maintains
the difference between knowledge of being, knowledge of word, knowledge
of nature, and knowledge of the self, and this knowledge of the self
takes shape in the constitution of thought as a field of subjective data
which are to be interpreted. And, the role of interpreter is assumed by
the work of a continuous verbalization of the most imperceptible
movements of the thought that's the reason we could say that the
Christian self which is correlated to this technique is a gnosiologic
self.
And the second point which seems to me important is this: you may notice
in early Christianity an oscillation between the truth-technology of the
self oriented toward the manifestation of the sinner, the manifestation
of the being--what we would call the ontological temptation of
Christianity, and that is the exomologesis--and another truth-technology
oriented toward the discursive and permanent analysis of the thought--
that is the exagoreusis, and we could see there the epistemological
temptation of Christianity. And, as you know, after a lot of conflicts
and fluctuation, the second form of technology, this epistemological
technology of the self, or this technology of the self oriented toward
the permanent verbalization and discovery of the most imperceptible
movements of our self, this form became victorious after centuries and
centuries, and it is nowadays dominating.
Even in these hermeneutical techniques derived from the exagoreusis the
production of truth could not be met, you remember, without a very
strict condition: hermeneutics of the self implies the sacrifice of the
self. And that is, I think, the deep contradiction, or, if you want, the
great richness, of Christian technologies of the self: no truth about
the self without a sacrifice of the self.[50] I think that one of the
great problems of Western culture has been to find the possibility of
founding the hermeneutics of the self not, as it was the case in early
Christianity, on the sacrifice of the self but, on the contrary, on a
positive, on the theoretical and practical, emergence of the self. That
was the aim of judicial institutions, that was the aim also of medical
and psychiatric practices, that was the aim of political and
philosophical theory-- to constitute the ground of the subjectivity as
the root of a positive self, what we could call the permanent
anthropologism of Western thought. And I think that this anthropologism
is linked to the deep desire to substitute the positive figure of man
for the sacrifice which for Christianity was the condition for the
opening of the self as a field of indefinite interpretation.[51] During
the last two centuries, the problem has been: what could be the
positive foundation for the technologies of the self that we have been
developing during centuries and centuries? But the moment, maybe, is
coming for us to ask, do we need, really, this hermeneutics of the
self?[52] Maybe the problem of the self is not to discover what it is in
its positivity, maybe the problem is not to discover a positive self or
the positive foundation of the self. Maybe our problem is now to
discover that the self is nothing else than the historical correlation
of the technology built in our history. Maybe the problem is to change
those technologies.[53] And in this case, one of the main political
problems would be nowadays, in the strict sense of the word, the
politics of ourselves.
Well, I thank you very much.
NOTES
[1.] See Francois Leuret, Du traitement morale de la folie (Paris: J. B.
Bailliere, 1840), and Foucault, Maladie mentale et psychologie, 3rd ed.
(Paris: PUF, 1966), 85-86; Mental Illness and Psychology, translated by
Alan Sheridan (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 72.
[2.] Edmund Husserl, Meditations Cartesiennes, translated by Gabrielle
Peiffer and Emmanuel Lewis (Paris: Arman Colin, 1931); Cartesian
Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, translated by Dorian
Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973).
[3.] "where society plays the role of subject" [Howison].
[4.] "So much for the general project. Now a few words on methodology.
For this kind of research, the history of science constitutes a
privileged point of view. This might seem paradoxical. After all, the
genealogy of the self does not take place within a field of scientific
knowledge, as if we were nothing else than that which rational knowledge
could tell us about ourselves. While the history of science is without
doubt an important testing ground for the theory of knowledge, as well
as for the analysis of meaningful systems, it is also fertile ground for
studying the genealogy of subject. There are two reasons for this. All
the practices by which the subject is defined and transformed are
accompanied by the formation of certain types of knowledge, and in the
West, for a variety of reasons, knowledge tends to be organized around
forms and norms that are more or less scientific. There is also another
reason maybe more fundamental and more specific to our societies. I mean
the fact that one of the main moral obligations for any subject is to
know oneself, to tell the truth about oneself, and to constitute oneself
as an object of knowledge both for other people and for oneself. The
truth obligation for individuals and a scientific organization of
knowledge; those are the two reasons why the history of knowledge
constitutes a privileged point of view for the genealogy of the subject.
Hence, it follows that I am not trying to do history of sciences in
general, but only of those which sought to construct a scientific
knowledge of the subject. Another consequence. I am not trying to
measure the objective value of these sciences, nor to know if they can
become universally valid. That is the task of an epistemological
historian. Rather, I am working on a history of science that is, to some
extent, regressive history that seeks to discover the discursive, the
institutional, and the social practices from which these sciences arose.
This would be an archaeological history. Finally, the third consequence,
this project seeks to discover the point at which these practices became
coherent reflective techniques with definite goals, the point at which a
particular discourse emerged from those techniques and came to be seen
as true, the point at which they are linked with the obligation of
searching for the truth and telling the truth. In sum, the aim of my
project is to construct a genealogy of the subject. The method is an
archaeology of knowledge, and the precise domain of the analysis is what
I should call technologies. I mean the articulation of certain
techniques and certain kinds of discourse about the subject.
I would like to add one final word about the practical significance of
this form of analysis. For Heidegger, it was through an increasing
obsession with techne as the only way to arrive at an understanding of
objects, that the West lost touch with Being. Let's turn the question
around and ask which techniques and practices form the Western concept
of the subject, giving it its characteristic split of truth and error,
freedom and constraint. l think that it is here where we will find the
real possibility of constructing a history of what we have done and, at
the same time, a diagnosis of what we are. This would be a theoretical
analysis which has, at the same time, a political dimension. By this
word 'political dimension,' I mean an analysis that relates to what we
are willing to accept in our world, to accept, to refuse, and to change,
both in ourselves and in our circumstances. In sum, it is a question of
searching for another kind of critical philosophy. Not a critical
philosophy that seeks to determine the conditions and the limits of our
possible knowledge of the object, but a critical philosophy that seeks
the conditions and the indefinite possibilities of transforming the
subject, of transforming ourselves" [Howison].
[5.] Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); The Order of
Things, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1970).
[6.] Naissance de la clinique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1963, 1972); The Birth of the Clinic, translated by Alan Sheridan (New
York: Pantheon, 1973) and Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975);
Discipline and Punish, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon,
1977).
[7.] La Volonte de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); The History of
Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (New
York: Pantheon, 1978); L'Usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984);
The Use of Pleasure, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon,
1985); Le Souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); The Care of the Self,
translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1986).
[8.] Jurgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968) and appendix in Technik und Wissenschaft als
"Ideologie"(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968); Knowledge and
Human Interests, translated by Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1971),
esp. "Appendix: Knowledge and Human Interests, A General Perspective,"
313.
[9.] Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by
Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).
[10.] "and known" [Howison].
[11.] "and know themselves" [Howison].
[12.] The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by Graham
Burchell et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
[13.] "as they spoke of it in the sixteenth century, of governing
children, or governing family, or governing souls" [Howison].
[14.] Resume de cours, 1970-1982 (Paris: Julliard, 1989), 133-66;
"Sexuality and Solitude," London Review of Books 3, no. 9 (May 21-June 3,
1981): 3, 5-6.
[15.] Seneca, "On Anger," Moral Essays, Volume 1, translated by John W.
Basore, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1958), 340-41.
[16.] Le Souci de soi, 77-79; The Care of the Self, 60-62; "L'ecriture
de soi," Corps ecrit 5 (February 1983): 21.
[17.] "all of them being a way to incorporate in a constant attitude a
code of actions and reactions, whatever situation may occur" [Howison].
[18.] Galen, "On the Diagnosis and Cure of the Soul's Passions," in On
the Passions and Errors of the Soul, translated by Paul W. Harkins
(Ohio State University Press, 1963).
[19.] Plutarch, "How a Man May Become Aware of His Progress in Virtue,"
in Moralia, Volume 1, translated by Frank Cole Babbitt, Loeb Classical
Library (New York: Putnam, 1927), 400-57, esp. 436-57.
[20.] Seneca, "On Tranquility of Mind," in Moral Essays, Volume 2,
translated by John W. Basore, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1935), 202-85, esp. 202-13.
[21.] "But, through this confession, through this description of his own
state, he asks Seneca to tell him the truth about his own state. Seneca
is at the same time confessing the truth and lacking in truth"
[Howison].
[22.] "If the role of confession and consultation is to give place to
truth as a force, it is easy to understand that self-examination has
nearly the same role. We have seen that if Seneca recalls every evening
his mistakes, it is to memorize the moral precepts of the conduct, and
memory is nothing else than the force of the truth when it is
permanently present and active in the soul. A permanent memory in the
individual and in his inner discourse, a persuasive rhetorics in the
master's advice--those are the aspects of truth considered as a force.
Then we may conclude self-examination and confession may be in ancient
philosophy considered as truth-game, and important truth-game, but the
objective of this truth-game is not to discover a secret reality inside
the individual. The objective of this truth-game is to make of the
individual a place where truth can appear and act as a real force
through the presence of memory and the efficiency of discourse"
[Howison].
[23.] "In the earliest form of Greek philosophy, poets and divine men
told the truth to ordinary mortals through this kind of gnome. Gnomai
were very short, very imperative, and so deeply illuminated by the
poetical light that it was impossible to forget them and to avoid their
power. Well, I think you can see that self-examination, confession, as
you find them, for instance, in Seneca, but also in Marcus Aurelius,
Epictetus, and so on, even as late as the first century A.D., self-
examination and confession were still a kind of development of the gnome
[Howison].
[24.] "the mnemonic aptitude of the individual and" [Howison].
[25.] "These depend in part on arts of memory and acts of persuasion. So,
technologies of the self in the ancient world are not linked with an art
of interpretation, but with arts such as mnemotechnics and rhetoric.
Self-observation, self-interpretation, self-hermeneutics won't intervene
in the technologies of the self before Christianity" [Howison].
[26.] [At the beginning of the second Howison lecture, Foucault said the
following:] "Well, several persons asked me to give a short resume of
what I said last night. I will try to do it as if it were a good TV
series. So, what happened in the first episode? Very few important
things. I have tried to explain why I was interested in the practice of
self-examination and confession. Those two practices seem to me to be
good witnesses for a major problem, which is the genealogy of the modern
self This genealogy has been my obsession for years because it is one of
the possible ways to get rid of a traditional philosophy of the subject.
I would like to outline this genealogy from the point of view of
techniques, what I call techniques of the self. Among these techniques
of the self, the most important, in modern societies, is, I think, that
which deals with the interpretive analysis of the subject, with the
hermeneutics of the self. How was the hermeneutics of the self formed?
This is the theme of the two lectures. Yesterday night, I spoke about
Greek and Roman techniques of the self, or at least about two of these
techniques, confession and self-examination. It is a fact that we meet
confession and self-examination very often in the late Hellenistic and
Roman philosophies. Are they the archetypes of Christian confession and
self-examination? Are they the early forms of the modern hermeneutics of
the self? I have tried to show that they are quite different from that.
Their aim is not, I think, to decipher a hidden truth in the depth of
the individual. Their aim is something else. It is to give force to
truth in the individual. Their aim is to constitute the self as the
ideal unity of the will and the truth. Well, now let us turn toward
Christianity as the cradle of Western hermeneutics of the self"
[27.] "at least in the Catholic branch of Christianity" [Howison].
[28.] "obligations not only to believe in certain things but also to
show that one believes in them. Every Christian is obliged to manifest
his faith" [Howison].
[29.] "If the gnomic self of the Greek philosophers, of which I spoke
yesterday evening, had to be built as an identification between the
force of the truth and the form of the will, we could say that there is
a gnostic self. This is the gnostic self that we can find described in
Thomas Evangilium or the Manichean texts. This gnostic self has to be
discovered inside the individual, but as a part, as a forgotten sparkle
of the primitive light" [Howison].
[30.] Technologies of the Self, 39-43.
[31.] Tertullian, "On Repentance," in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, edited by
A. Roberts and J. Donaldson (Grand Rapids, Ml: Eerdmans, n.d., repr.
1979), 657-68, esp. " Exomologesis," chaps. 9-12, 664-66.
[32.] Jerome, "Letter LXXVII, to Oceanus," in The Principal Works of St.
Jerome, translated by W. H. Freemantle, vol. 6 in A Select Library of
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (New York: Christian Literature Co., 1893)
, 157-62, esp. 159-60.
[33.] Cyprian, "Letter XXXVI, from the Priests and Deacons Abiding in
Rome to Pope Cyprian," in Saint Cyprian: Letters (1-81), 90-94 at 93,
translated by Sister Rose Bernard Donna, C.S.J., vol. 51 in The Fathers
of the Church (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press,
1964).
[34.] "This form, attested to from the end of the second century, will
subsist for an extremely long time in Christianity, since one finds its
after-effects in the orders of penitents so important in the fifteenth
and sixteenth century. One can see that the procedure for showing forth
the truth are multiple and complex unit. Certain acts of exomologesis
take place in private but most are addressed to the public" [Howison].
[35.] "The greater part of the acts which constitute penance has the
role not of celling the truth about the sin; it has the role of showing
the true being of the sinner, or the true sinful being of the subject.
The Tertullian expression, publicatio sui, is not a way to say the
sinner has to explain his sins. The expression means he has to produce
himself as a sinner in his reality of sinner. And now the question is
why the showing forth of the sinner should be efficient to efface the
sins" [Howison].
[36.] "On Repentance," chap. 10.
[37.] "The day of judgment, the Devil himself will stand up to accuse
the sinner. If the sinner has already anticipated him by accusing
himself, the enemy will be obliged to remain quiet" [Howison].
[38.] "It must not be forgotten that the practice and the theory of
penitence were elaborated to a great extent around the problem of the
relapsed.... The relapsed abandons the faith in order to keep the life
of here below" [Howison].
[39.] "In brief, penance insofar as it is a reproduction of martyrdom is
an affirmation of change--of rupture with one's self, with one's past
metanoia, of a rupture with the world, and with all previous life"
[Howison].
[40.] See esp. St. John Chrysostom, "Homily XLII," on Matthew 12:33, in
St. Chrysostom: Homilies on the Gospel of St. Matthew, edited by Phillip
Schaff, vol. 10 in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene
Fathers (Grand Rapids, Ml: Eerdmans, repr. 1975), 271.
[41.] John Cassian, De Institutiones Coenobiorum and Collationes Patrum,
edited by Phillip Schaff, in vol. 11 of A Select Library of Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, Ml: Eerdmans, repr. 1973).
[42.] "This is the soul that Cassian described with two Greek words
[undecipherable]. It means that the soul is always moving and moving in
all directions" [Howison].
[43.] "and the Greek fathers called diacrisis" [Howison].
[44.] "What I would like to insist upon this evening is something else,
or, at least, something indirectly related to that. There is sometbing
really important in the way Cassian poses the problem of truth about
the thought. First of all, thoughts (not desires, not passions, not
attitudes, not acts) appear in Cassian's work and in all the
spirituality it represents as a field of subjective data which have to
be considered and analyzed as an object. And I think that is the first
time in history that thoughts are considered as possible objects for an
analysis. Second, thoughts have to be analyzed not in relation to their
object, according to objective experience, or according to logical rules,
they have to be suspected since they can be secretly altered, disguised
in their own substance. Third, what man needs if he does not want to be
the victim of his own thoughts is a perpetual hermeneutics
interpretation, a perpetual work of hermeneutics. The function of this
hermeneutics is to discover the reality hidden inside the thought.
Fourth, this reality which is able to hide in my thoughts is a power, a
power which is not of another nature than my soul, as is, for instance,
the body. The power which hides inside my thoughts, this power is of the
same nature of my thoughts and of my soul. It is the Devil. It is the
presence of somebody else in me. This constitution of the thoughts as a
field of subjective data needing an interpretive analysis in order to
discover the power of the other in me is, that is, I think, if we
compare it to the Stoic technologies of the self, a quite new manner to
organize the relationships between truth and subjectivity. I think that
hermeneutics of the self begins there" [Howison].
[45.] John Cassian, Second Conference of Abbot Moses, chap. 11, 312-13
at 312, in vol. 11 of A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers
of the Christian Church, edited by Philip Schaft and Henry Wace (Grand
Rapids, Ml: Eerdmans, 1955).
[46.] "a power of diacrisis, of differences" [Howison].
[47.] "for the rupture of the self" [Howison].
[48.] Technologies of the Self, 43-49.
[49.] ", what I call the gnomic self. In the beginning of the lecture, I
indicated that the Gnostic movements were a question of constituting an
ontological unity, the knowledge of the soul and the knowledge of the
being. Then, what could be called the gnostic self could be constituted
in Christianity" [Howison].
[50.] "The centrality of the confession of sins in Christianity finds an
explanation here. The verbalization of the confession of sins is
institutionalized as a discursive truth-game, which is a sacrifice of
the subject" [Howison].
[51.] "In addition, we can say that one of the problems of Western
culture was: how could we save the hermeneutics of the self and get rid
of the necessary sacrifice of the self which was linked to this
hermeneutics since the beginning of Christianity" [Howison].
[52.] "which we have inherited from the first centuries of Christianity?
Do we need a positive man who serves as the foundation of this
hermeneutics of the self?" [Howison].
[53.] "or maybe to get rid of those technologies, and then, to get rid
of the sacrifice which is linked to those technologies" [Howison].
~~~~~~~~
By MICHEL FOUCAULT
Mark Blasius is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the City
University of New York/La Guardia. His research and publications are
concerned with modern and contemporary political theory and social
thought, and his book A Politics of Sexuality is forthcoming. A portion
of the argument of this book was published in Political Theory, Vol. 20,
No. 4 as "An Ethos of Lesbian and Gay Existence."
Copyright of Political Theory is the property of Sage Publications Inc.
and its content may not be copied without the copyright
holder's express written permission except for the print or
download capabilities of the retrieval software used for
access. This content is intended solely for the use of the
individual user.
Source: Political Theory, May93, Vol. 21 Issue 2, p198, 30p.
Item Number: 9306095884
