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Foucault, Ethical Self-concern and the Other

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In his later writings on ethics Foucault argues that rapport à soi – the relationship to oneself – is what gives meaning to our commitment to ‘moral behaviour’. In the absence of rapport à soi, Foucault believes, ethical adherence collapses into obedience to rules (‘an authoritarian structure’). I make a case, in broadly Levinasian terms, for saying that the call of ‘the other’ is fundamental to ethics. This prompts the question whether rapport à soi fashions an ethical subject who is unduly self-concerned. Here we confront two apparently irreconcilable pictures of the source of moral demands. I describe one way of trying to reconcile them from a Foucaultian perspective, and I note the limitations in the attempt. I also try to clear away what I think to be a misunderstanding on Foucault’s part about what is at stake in the choice between these pictures. To clarify my critique of Foucault, I also relate it to a similar recent critique of virtue ethics by Thomas Hurka.

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Notes

  1. Barry Smart has critiqued Foucault from a Levinasian perspective. See B. Smart, ‘Foucault, Levinas and the subject of responsibility', in J. Moss ed., The Later Foucault (London: Sage Publications, 1998), pp. 78–92.

  2. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics trans. T. Irwin (Hackett Publishing Company, 1985), Bk II, Chs 4–5, 1105a17–1105b28; C. Taylor, ‘Iris Murdoch and moral philosophy’, in M. Antonaccio & W. Schweiker, eds, Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 1–3; I. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals trans. H. Paton (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), Ch.1, pp. 61–62 (Ak.393–394). (All quotations from the Nicomachean Ethics are from Irwin’s translation.)

  3. M. Foucault, ‘On the genealogy of ethics’, in P. Rabinow ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 340–372; M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol 2 The Use of Pleasure trans R. Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), pp. 25–32. A useful summary of Foucault’s account of rapport à soi is to be found in Arnold Davidson, ‘Archaeology, genealogy, ethics’, in D. Hoy ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 221–234.

  4. All descriptions of the four aspects of rapport à soi quoted in the above paragraph are from The Use of Pleasure, pp. 25–26. The examples of ethical telos in the final sentence are taken from ‘On the genealogy of ethics’, p. 355.

  5. Christine Korsgaard has recently argued for a more robust conception of the ethical subject than is found in current ethical ‘theories’. C. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). It is an interesting question where the kinds of socio-cultural self-identifications Korsgaard discusses would fit in Foucault’s picture. I suspect there is no single answer.

  6. The Use of Pleasure, p. 25.

  7. ‘On the genealogy of ethics’, p. 352.

  8. See especially M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977).

  9. For this phrase, and its implications, see Foucault’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in Rabinow ed., op.cit., pp. 32–50.

  10. ‘On the genealogy of ethics’, p. 343.

  11. Op. cit., p. 348.

  12. L. Kritzman (ed.), Philosophy, Politics and Culture (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 49.

  13. For example, in the first two references cited in n. 3 above. On Foucault’s picture, by the way, the assumption of the background is itself best thought of as a precipitation of rapport à soi, even though it could not clearly-sightedly be acknowledged as such by those who lived under it.

  14. It is a commonplace that Nietzsche is a huge influence on Foucault, but this does not mean that we should assume Nietzsche’s direct influence every time a view of Foucault’s resembles one of Nietzsche’s.

  15. F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Penguin: 1990) Part V: On the Natural History of Morals, Sect 187, p. 110.

  16. M. Foucault, ‘the ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom’, in J. Bernauer & D. Rasmussen eds., The Final Foucault (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998), p. 7. It is true that Foucault is here expressing the view of ‘the Greeks’ rather than his own view. But the tenor of the discussion that follows the sentence quoted makes it evident, I think, that Foucault shares the priority of care for self over care for others that he ascribes to the Greeks.

  17. The Use of Pleasure, pp. 27–28.

  18. The other three aspects of rapport à soi constitute the other formal elements of ascesis: the different ‘material’ of conduct on which ascesis can work; the various ways in which one can conceive of oneself as the subject of one’s ascetic practice; and the various forms of actual practice – prayer, techniques of self-control, monitoring of one’s desires, etc – that one’s ascesis can take.

  19. The Use of Pleasure, pp. 29–30.

  20. ‘the ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom’, p. 8.

  21. I think it is a misreading of Kant. Part of what has encouraged it is a mistranslation – for example by Paton. Paton speaks variously of actions done ‘for the sake of duty’, ‘from duty’, and ‘from the motive of duty’, where Kant’s single phrase is ‘aus Plifcht’, best translated ‘from duty’ or perhaps ‘out of duty’. I. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals trans. H.J. Paton (Harper Torchbooks 1964). It can seem a small step from morally right action done ‘for the sake of duty’ to such action done ‘for its own sake’. For further discussion of how better to understand Kant on action done from duty, see my Ethical Encounter (Palgrave: London and New York, 2002), Chapter 5, ‘Duty and Ethical Motivation’, pp. 86–103.

  22. Op. cit., p. 31.

  23. Bernard Williams has clarified and elaborated a picture of shame as reflecting a sense of one’s own ethically ‘diminished’ selfhood, in Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), especially pp. 92–93 & 220–223.

  24. R. Gaita, Good and Evil (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 52. Here and below I am indebted to Gaita’s discussion of remorse, op. cit., pp. 43–65.

  25. The Use of Pleasure, pp. 29–30.

  26. These formulations might capture what occasions (a certain sense of) guilt. But if they do, that shows the distance of such guilt from remorse, a point touched on earlier. (I thus resist Gaita’s equation of remorse with ‘guilt feeling’, op. cit., p. 50.) For further helpful discussion of remorse and its difference from guilt, see S. Tudor, Compassion and Remorse (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2001) Ch. 6, ‘The Other and the self as disclosed in remorse’, pp. 127–148. Nietzsche of course has a lot to say about guilt in The Genealogy of Morals (see especially Second Essay, Parts IV–VI). He represents guilt as a matter of ‘being indebted’. It belongs to the ‘contractual relation’ between creditor and debtor. Nietzsche is scathing about our psychological internalising of guilt as a feeling or emotion. No doubt the ‘psychological’ experience of guilt can be destructive, but Nietzsche does not, in my view, show that it must be. But that aside, nothing he says engages with the distinctive concept of remorse as I have characterised it. Nietzsche’s thought shares, I believe, the limitation I have described in Foucault’s – though here my critical discussion is confined to Foucault.

  27. Foucault is far from alone in this respect. A great deal of moral philosophy misses this. For ways in which accounts of guilt mistakenly focus on ‘infraction of a code’, see Jeffrie G Murphy, ‘Shame creeps through guilt and feels like retribution’, Law and Philosophy 18: pp. 327–344, 1999; and my ‘Guilt, remorse and victims’, Philosophical Investigations 30 (4): pp. 337–362.

  28. One site in Foucault’s work might be thought at least to come close to acknowledging this theme. In his Maurice Blanchot: the thought from outside, in the section entitled ‘Where is the Law, and what does it do?’ Foucault writes: ‘How could one know the law and truly experience it, how could one force it to come into view, to exercise its powers clearly, to speak, without provoking it, without pursuing it into its recesses, without resolutely going ever farther into the outside into which it is always receding? How can one see its invisibility unless it has been turned into its opposite, punishment, which, after all, is only ever the law overstepped, irritated, beside itself?’ Maurice Blanchot: the thought from outside trans. B. Massumi (New York: Zone Books, 1987) pp. 34–35. But this theme is not (in my view) integrated into the later writings on ethics that are the topic of this essay. Furthermore, a concern with ‘the outside’ need not by itself lead to the other as characterised in my text above, and in that essay of Foucault’s does not do so. (Its thrust remains much closer to Nietzsche than to Levinas.) For these reasons, this early essay of Foucault’s, while tantalising, offers little to deflect the criticisms advanced in this paper.

  29. For more on this issue see the discussion of The Elder Zossima, from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in my Ethical Encounter, pp. 82–83.

  30. This should make it clear that I have not been criticising Foucault’s ethical telos in the name of a ‘deontological’ account of ethics – in accordance with a time-honoured but tired classification that is mistakenly supposed to capture all the live possibilities.

  31. E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969; and Otherwise than Being (Hague; Boston: M. Nijhoff, 1991).

  32. See, for example, E. Levinas, ‘The Other, utopia and justice’, in Entre-Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); and E. Levinas, ‘Peace and proximity’, in E. Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings eds., A. Peperzak, S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (Indiana University Press, 1996) pp. 161–172. (Levinas uses upper case ‘A’ for ‘Autrui’ (‘Other’) and I use upper case ‘O’ for ‘Other’ henceforth.)

  33. This and the preceding quotations in this paragraph are from T. Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 246.

  34. Nicomachean Ethics, 1123b27.

  35. Op. cit., 1123b18–22.

  36. Hurka op. cit., pp. 138–139: ‘(W)hat is best for [the teacher] is to care about her virtue less than about the knowledge [it produces]. If she cares more about her virtue, she divides her love disproportionately, which is at least a shortfall in virtue and in extreme cases a vice.’ (I note that while the suggestion here seems to be that only ‘disproportionate’ such division of love or concern is a problem, elsewhere Hurka implies that any motivating concern for one’s own virtue is a ‘shortfall’ in virtue. See for example p. 246.)

  37. This reading of Aristotle’s ethics admittedly runs athwart the main tradition of Aristotelian interpretation. Two commentators of recent times who similarly resist the tradition, in illuminating ways, are John Casey in his Pagan Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), and Raimond Gaita, op. cit. ‘Aristotelian virtue and its limitations’, Chapter One of my own Ethical Encounter (op. cit.), which develops the above reading, is greatly indebted to both these thinkers. Bernard Williams’ Shame and Necessity (op. cit.) also lends support to this reading.

  38. Beyond Good and Evil, Section 188, p. 110.

  39. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd edn (Notre Dame University Press, 1984).

  40. Beyond Good and Evil, Section 187, p. 110

  41. T. Ogletree, Hospitality to the Stranger: dimensions of moral understanding (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), p. 35.

  42. It is a remarkable fact that the list of those philosophers who have located the other human being and his directly experienced value at the heart of the authority we can discover moral claims to have upon us is so short. Raimond Gaita (op. cit.) is a more recent name to add to the list.

  43. A mistaken conception shared, I think, by Nietzsche, though that claim would need much further argument. The line of argument would be, briefly, that there are forms of moral adherence wholly free of the marks of slave morality that at the same time are seriously distorted if represented as expressions of the will to power.

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Cordner, C. Foucault, Ethical Self-concern and the Other. Philosophia 36, 593–609 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9138-4

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