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Philosophy as a way of life : Foucault and Hadot

Thomas Flynn Philosophy Social Criticism 2005 31: 609 DOI: 10.1177/0191453705055492 The online version of this article can be found at: http://psc.sagepub.com/content/31/5-6/609

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Thomas Flynn

Philosophy as a way of life

Foucault and Hadot

Abstract Michel Foucault surveyed the history of Western philosophy in terms of the Delphic Know thyself and the Socratic care of the self. The former generates academic philosophy as we know it today whereas the latter conceives of philosophy as a way of life. At issue are competing notions of truth and the philosophical relevance of the discursive/nondiscursive domains. Comparing this account with a similar but distinct reading of the same Greek texts by Greco-Roman historian Pierre Hadot, I underscore the existentialist tenor of this distinction and assess the challenges and liabilities of pursuing philosophy as a way of life. Key words Alcibiades care of the self existentialism Foucault Hadot Hermneutique du sujet Know thyself philosophy as a way of life philosophys nature Plato Socrates spirituality

In his later lectures at the Collge de France, Michel Foucault surveyed the history of Western philosophy in terms of two rubrics, the Delphic Know thyself (gnothi seauton) and the Socratic care of the self (epimeleia heautou). Though his overview was more nuanced than this rather stark dichotomy suggests, one can summarize roughly his claim that the former hardens into the theoretical disciplines of academic philosophy as we nd them today: metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, philosophy of mind, and the like, conveyed by a detached mode of reection and an antiseptic notion of truth that is emblemized in what Foucault calls the Cartesian moment in philosophical thought. The career of care of the self, on the other hand, moves through the Stoics, Epicureans and Cynics toward such non-academic domains of selfformation or spiritual exercise as catechesis, political training, and psychological counseling.

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 31 nos 56 pp. 609622

Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453705055492

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If both these branches of philosophy stem from Platonic roots, Foucault argues, the concepts of truth operative in each domain come to differ signicantly. The properly academic or scholastic version is cognitivist, scientic and/or epistemological, as that term came to be canonized in the profession. The distinguishing feature of truth for philosophical practice as care of the self, on the other hand, is the harmony or coherence that obtains between the sages life and teaching. As Platos Laches explains in a dialogue by that name:
I take the speaker and his speech together, and observe how they sort and harmonize with each other. Such a man is exactly what I understand by musical [mousikos] he has tuned himself with the fairest harmony, not that of a lyre or other entertaining instrument, but has made a true concord of his own life between his words and his deeds . . . Now of Socrates words I have no experience, but formerly, I fancy, I have made trial of his deeds.1

On this account, it would seem that Socrates was admired more for his manner of living and dying, Foucault notes, than for his doctrine. This view can be gleaned from the sets of public lectures that Foucault delivered at the Collge de France in the years immediately preceding his untimely death in 1984. Foucaults colleague at the Collge de France, Greco-Roman intellectual historian and philologist Pierre Hadot, agrees in large part with this reading of Socrates and insists that almost without exception classical philosophy was primarily formative (protreptic) rather than informative in character, to use a contrast he borrows from classicist Victor Goldschmidt. On this reading, the wisdom which philosophy by denition seeks consists in a manner of existing, a way of life, more than a systematic discourse on the nature of man and/or the world. A brief review of the course offerings in Departments of Philosophy in the United States today would scarcely exhibit an explicit concern with wisdom in that Socratic sense. Rather, these academic programs appear to have inherited the Delphic legacy and the cognitivist understanding of truth to which they strenuously adhere. Nonetheless, recent revival of interest in Hellenistic ethics lends credibility to the attractiveness of the Socratic notion of philosophy as care of the self, if not to the validity of Foucaults original distinction and separation of it from the Delphic prescription. At issue is the relevance of the very differentiation between theoretical and practical philosophy as well as the corresponding conception of knowledge and truth claimed to be operative in each alternative. As long as the ideal of dispassionately objective knowledge and absolute truth in the natural and human sciences continues to hold sway, so too will the Delphic prescription as Foucault describes it. But as these ideals lose their luster, especially in the face of personal failure and social disaster,

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the Socratic attractiveness of philosophical wisdom as the fruit of selfcare seems to be growing apace. All of this sounds quite existentialist in tone a feature not lost on Foucaults interlocutors and one readily admitted with qualications by Hadot himself. What I would like to pursue in the concluding portion of my remarks is the existentialist signicance of this turn or return in recent French thought and to add several cautionary observations regarding the shift in philosophical interest that it portends.

Foucault and care of the self

Foucault described his overall project or, better, ongoing interest in different ways at various times of his life. He thereby invited us to view or review his work from different, arguably complementary, perspectives. The three best known in order of their explicit emergence in his histories are the pairs knowledge/truth, power/governmentality, and subjectivation/ethics. He closes this triangle of what late in his career he called three axes for proposed analysis of problems and practices when he informs us that the relation of subjectivation and truth has been his continuing concern.2 It is in the context of that problematic that he appeals to what we have designated the Delphic and the Socratic aspects of truth and self-constitution. Foucaults interest in history was never antiquarian. As he reminds us on several occasions, his histories are histories of the present; that is, they arise from current problems on which they seek to gain insight by addressing how what traditionally are taken for analogous issues have been problematized in other historical and cultural contexts. This carries the twofold advantage of bringing into focus how different our perception and ordering of seemingly similar phenomena often are from those of others and how the perceived contingency of our present practices converts into live possibilities several alternatives that we had heretofore dismissed as beyond the pale. In other words, what we might call philosophical history at his hand reveals how Other they are from us and how other we too could become from what we are. This last is the critical dimension of his investigations. As he admitted in his Tanner Lectures: Experience has taught me that the history of various forms of rationality is sometimes more effective in unsettling our certitudes and dogmatism than is abstract criticism.3 So we may conclude that one of the uses of his history of the distinction between the Delphic and the Socratic maxims is to underscore the changeable nature of philosophical practice itself as a prelude to reassessing its character and status in our day. In fact, one could view his own method of problematizing the marginalization of care of the self in philosophical discourse and

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practice since the Hellenistic era as a means of inviting us, as he said in an interview, to experience our modernity such that we might come out of it transformed (Essential Works [hereafter EW], vol. 3, p. 242). Transformation is the goal of philosophical practice as a way of life, on Foucaults reading, whereas, as Hadot acknowledged, information is the objective of classical self-knowledge. In other words, Foucaults method of problematizing can be seen as ingredient in the practice of philosophy as a way of life. On what, then, does Foucault base this crucial distinction and what is its philosophical import? As the work of a philosophical historian (for want of a better label), his case focuses on texts from classical antiquity, but initially on a Platonic text whose attribution is disputed but where the distinction, he seems to believe, is most clearly drawn, namely, the Alcibiades.4 Though his argument and this text appear in several of his lectures and interviews, I shall concentrate on his discussion of it in the course he delivered at the Collge de France during the 19812 academic year, entitled The Hermeneutic of the Subject (Hermneutique du sujet [hereafter HS]). There the topic is the relation between truth, becoming a subject, and the practices (aske seis) that connect them reciprocally. As is often the case in his later lectures and writings, Foucault sees Platos works as the trunk from which two distinct limbs branch, namely the intellectualist understanding of self-knowledge based on insight into the nature of the true self in its form or essence and the existential (my term) limb of self-concern that is concrete, practical and the fruit of certain aske seis that Foucault calls practices or technologies of the self. Though we have just observed the point being clearly made in the Laches, a text that Foucault scarcely ignores, it is the Alcibiades major (or the First Alcibiades, as it is known in the English-speaking world) that Foucault mines for the distinction between the regard its interlocutors have for the doctrine of Socrates and their respect for the harmony and consistency they observe between his teaching and his style of life. Foucault intends to show from that text how the epimeleia heautou (care of the self) is the frame, the soil, the foundation on which the imperative to know oneself is justied (HS 10). And, of course, this distinction is at work in Socrates famous self-defense before the Athenian court in the Apology. But Foucault extends this foundational role beyond Socrates/Plato to the philosophical attitude of subsequent Greek, Hellenistic and Roman culture (ibid.). Though the imperative to know thyself is commonly associated with Socrates, Foucault insists that Socrates in the nal analysis is the man of care of the self and will continue to play that role (ibid.). If these two maxims are intertwined in Plato, how did they become

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undone? The answer, Foucault believes, lies in their respective concepts of truth and of the labor of the subject to attain it. As he describes the situation, each has its corresponding sense of truth and of how one reaches it. Self-knowledge is achieved by intellectual discipline: study, focus on the really real or the universal and impersonal. Dialectic and induction play a major role in this process of investigation. It is a discursive operation that yields knowledge as grasp of the necessary and the changeless. Correspondingly, the subject must try to remove himself or herself from the process entirely in the sense that the divine power of the thinker is to prescind from the particular and its contingencies. There is no science of the singular, as Aristotle famously proclaims5 and as Foucault disproves in detail in his The Birth of the Clinic.6 Episte as opposed to doxa is necessary and universal. Its achievement me makes no moral demands on the knower; hero and villain have equal access to science. Though he admits that there is a renement in this history as it continues through the practice of philosophical inquiry in the West, the Cartesian moment, as we mentioned, captures the career of this maxim in the modern age. Following the model of scientic investigation, one merely has to open ones eyes, reason correctly, and follow the line of evidence tenaciously in order to be capable of truth. With Kant, Foucault claims, this process is re-enforced by appeal to the transcendental condition for any possible experience: What we are not capable of knowing constitutes [fait] precisely the very structure of the knowing subject that brings it about that we are unable to know it (HS 183). This makes any spiritual transformation of the subject that might give it access to the truth chimerical and paradoxical. Care of the self, on the other hand, makes greater demands on the one who would pursue the truth it proposes. Rather than a theoretical insight or an informative conclusion, the truth toward which care of the self strives is ongoing and existential. What is the price that I must pay to gain access to this truth? Foucault challenges. What is the labor that I must undertake on myself . . . what is the modication of being that I must set about to gain access to the truth? (HS 182). Here Foucault introduces the expression the condition of spirituality for access to the truth (HS 184). He sees a kind of Platonic or better neoPlatonic circularity or at least reciprocity between the subject and the truth it seeks at work here. This truth is not primarily cognitive but moral; it is not something one has but a way one is. It is redolent of Existentialist authenticity or being true to oneself. One thinks of Kierkegaards famous truth as subjectivity in this regard. It is a question of a truth that one is rather than a truth that one possesses (again contrast this with Kierkegaardian truth as objectivity).7 What kind of person must one become and how does one become it in order to gain access to the truth that, in turn, facilitates this very access?8

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What, then, is this spirituality that makes its appearance and plays an increasingly important role in Foucaults later works?9 In sum, it is that process of self-transformation that includes such practices as meditation, control of ones appetites and desires, writing moral maxims for ease of recollection, examination of conscience, and the like, which found widespread use among Hellenistic and Roman philosophers but which occur in the space, the break, between discourse and livingthrough (le Vcu) that we already nd in the Alcibiades. Foucault admits that such practices predate Socrates and Plato. But their introduction into the Western philosophical tradition bears important consequences for the career of philosophy and its exercise in our day. The fact that spirituality and spiritual exercises came to be associated with religious, especially Christian, aesceticism, served to accentuate the unbraiding of these two maxims that Platonism has bequeathed to philosophical discourse in the West. Spirituality buried itself in the monasteries and, in a more secular age, marshaled its powers in the exhortations of Marx to change the world rather than merely to understand it and the transformations pursued by Freudian psychoanalysis. Foucault observes that Western philosophy can be read in its entire history as the slow disengagement of the question: How, on what conditions, can one think the truth? from the question: How, at what price, according to what procedure, must one change the modes of being of the subject in order to gain access to the truth? (HS 172 n.). And he claims that the challenge facing philosophy in our day is to reconcile our knowledge of the world gained by mastery of an objectifying technique (techne with the task to accomplish the truth of the subject ) that we are (HS 467). No doubt, the cognitive and transformative power of philosophical spirituality became intertwined once more in the work of Hegel. In fact, Foucault concludes his lectures on the hermeneutic of the subject with the claim that the Phenomenology of Spirit is the summit of this philosophy that would address this challenge. Perhaps, as he opined somewhat hyperbolically in his inaugural lecture ten years earlier, we have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.10

Hadot on Foucaults Delphic/Socratic distinction

Though they never met until Foucault invited Hadot to accept candidacy for election to the Collge de France, Foucault was quite taken with Hadots work, especially, so it seems, with his seminal essay on spiritual exercises in ancient Greek and Hellenistic philosophy.11 At a conference commemorating the fourth anniversary of Foucaults death,

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Hadot delivered a communication entitled Reections on the notion of the cultivation of the self.12 His topic was Foucaults use of techniques of the self as the equivalent of what Hadot called spiritual exercises and he was critical of the equivalency on two counts. First, it overemphasizes the self as individual and self-constituting whereas Hadot believes that the self for which the Platonists and Stoics cared was the true self, the best or superior part of the self. Stoic spiritual exercises, for example, are aimed at moving beyond the self to thinking and acting in union with universal reason (Michel Foucault, Philosopher [hereafter MFP], p. 226). This is a criticism that Hadot levels against the Existentialists in more recent times as well. In both cases (Foucaults and the Existentialists), he believes, it leads to an aestheticism or dandyism a word that has re-entered the active philosophical vocabulary with the postmodern interest in Baudelaire. Yet even the Epicureans, with whose ethics Foucaults aesthetic of existence has more in common, propounded a social dimension that, in Hadots view, is missing in Foucaults approach. In fact, Foucaults constructivism (not Hadots term) seems unable to avoid a certain aestheticism when it comes to offering us an aesthetics of existence as the model for a contemporary ethics (MFP 230 and Hadots La Philosophie comme manire de vivre, hereafter [PV], p. 227), and this is Hadots second criticism of the equivalency between his spiritual exercises and Foucaults technologies of the self. As for Foucaults reading of the Alcibiades and his sharp distinction between what we have been calling the Delphic and the Socratic maxims, Hadot claims that in this dialogue self-knowledge and care of the self are in a sense on the same track (en quelque sorte une seule et mme dmarche).13 This rather ambiguous statement need not be read as countering Foucaults position, especially when one reads care of the self as providing the basis and/or frame for practices of self-knowledge. But it scarcely endorses the sharp distinction that Foucault wishes to draw and subsequently exploit.14 And it seems to be Foucaults later use of care of the self to sketch an art of living for our day that occasions Hadots objection: Foucault proposes an art of living, an aesthetic of existence, a style of life that obviously would not reproduce the spiritual exercises of antiquity but which would open for the subject the possibility of constituting himself in freedom in opposition to external powers (ibid., p. 22). Hadot favors the Stoic wisdom of Marcus Aurelius, namely, attempting to practice objectivity of judgment, attempting to live according to justice in the service of the human community, and attempting to become aware of our situation as belonging to the universe (that is, acting on the basis of the lived experience of ourselves as concrete, living and perceiving subjects) (MFP 320). He believes that our contemporaries are quite

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capable of performing the spiritual exercises requisite for the pursuit of such wisdom, once the philosophical and mythical discourses that accompany them are removed. And he points to the abiding existential density of the internal experiences [to which such exercises appeal] that escapes all attempts at theorization and systematization (MFP 321). It is these internal experiences and their existential density that I would like to underscore because I believe they resonate with what I wish to call the existentialist revival to which philosophy as a way of life gives witness. Hadots sensitivity to the existentialist dimension of care of the self comes to the fore in his Eloge de Socrate that appeared as part of the third edition of his Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique.15 After conceding that the historical Socrates is in the main inaccessible, Hadot turns to two of his 19th-century interpreters whose role in conveying the living sense of care of the self to the contemporary mind he considers decisive. For both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Socrates was an ambiguous gure, the object of a kind of lovehate relationship. There is much to parse in these relations that can only be sketched here. In the case of Kierkegaard, Hadot parallels Kierkegaards protestation that he was not a Christian with the Socratic insistence that he was not a sage. In both instances the ironist thereby gained a freedom of thought and action to pursue authentic faith and wisdom respectively while inviting us to do the same. Hadot likens these moves to the adoption of so many masks: This Socratic mask is the mask of irony (Eloge 21). In Nietzsches case, Schopenhauer and Wagner served this ironic masking function. He made use of them the way Plato used Socrates to conceal and reveal himself. The famous indirect communication used by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche also imitates the Socratic method of effecting a change of heart, a conversion, a revaluation of the direction of ones life. As Hadot observes: By this appeal to the being of the individual, the Socratic approach [dmarche] is existential. That is why Kierkegaard and Nietzsche wished to repeat it, each in his own way (Eloge 32). Seconding Foucaults major thesis, Hadot insists: In a certain sense, one could say that there have always been two opposing conceptions of philosophy [in the West]: one placing its accent on the pole of discourse and the other on the pole of choice of life (PV 102). Though he does not call these respective poles the Delphic and the Socratic, Hadot does admit with seeming resignation that philosophers will never succeed in overcoming their self-satisfaction felt in the pleasure of talking. But he goes on to counsel that, in order to remain faithful to the
. . . Socratic inspiration of philosophy, a new ethic of philosophical discourse must be proposed in which one would renounce taking oneself as an end in itself [comme n en soi] or, still worse, as a means for the showy

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display [talage] of the eloquence of a philosophe but instead would become a means of moving beyond oneself and of reaching the level of universal reason and of opening to others. (PV 1023)

While Foucault would not subscribe to Hadots transcendent universal reason, he could admit the normative force of Western ratio as he did in The Order of Things with the proviso that we acknowledged the dangers and minimized the harm that such Reason tends to bring in its wake.16 And he has repeatedly insisted that care of the self in its full exercise necessarily involves care of others. Finally, Foucault would add a further dimension to Hadots ideal of moving beyond oneself to include taking distance on oneself or thinking otherwise than before (se dprendre de soi-mme) which he considers the ethic of an intellectual in our day.17

The existentialist presence

Let us acknowledge at the outset that existentialism like postmodernism is so broadly and inconsistently employed as to have become a nearly meaningless term. Still, people familiar with the movement acknowledge that a set of shared theses and themes can be extracted from so-called existentialist writings to delineate a school of philosophical thought and practice which, despite major 19th-century precursors, ourished in the 20th century, especially in the years between the two world wars and immediately after the second one. Several of these features have appeared in the foregoing characterization of philosophy as care of the self. Let us recall three of the most distinctive: emphasis on ethics over metaphysics; stress on exercises/techniques that foster individual choice; and, nally, relative neglect of, if not open hostility toward, systematic thought. That Hadot nds Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (the commonly acknowledged fathers of theistic and atheistic existentialism respectively) to be the models of the Socratic approach in recent thought conrms the afnities that Hadot and perhaps even Foucault recognize between philosophy as a way of life and vintage existentialist thought and practice. The place where Hadot would qualify his adoption of the existentialist style is the space where universal reason holds sway. And yet he admits with regard to Platonic dialogues that, besides the dialectical movement of logos, there is the path of dialogical exchange itself between Socrates and his interlocutor, which Hadot calls that common will to reach agreement and which he characterizes as de lamour. Philosophy, he insists, resides much more in that spiritual exercise than in the construction of a system. As he explains: the task of dialogue consists, even essentially, in showing the limits of language, the

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impossibility for language to communicate moral and existential experience (Eloge 54). Neither Kierkegaard nor Sartre could have phrased it better. Foucault, for his part, seemed to bristle when compared to Sartre. And yet there were sufcient indications of similarity between them that Dreyfus and Rabinow could ask: But if one is to create oneself without recourse to knowledge or universal rules, how does your view differ from Sartrian existentialism? Foucault responds that, despite a theoretical commitment to self-creativity, Sartrean authenticity in practice appeals to a self as given and to which one must be true.18 But it is commonly acknowledged that this understanding of Sartrean authenticity is mistaken and that it more closely resembles Foucaults notion of self-creation than the latter may wish to allow. Moreover, Sartres version avoids the aestheticism that Hadot found offensive in Foucaults version of self-creation as an aesthetics of existence. In his famous lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre observes:
Doubtless [the moral agent] chooses without reference to any pre-established values, but it is unjust to tax him with caprice. Rather, let us say that moral choice is comparable to the construction of a work of art. But here I must at once digress to make it quite clear that we are not propounding an aesthetic morality, for our adversaries are disingenuous enough to reproach us even with that.19

The political commitments of both Sartre and Foucault seem incompatible with either aestheticism or, for that matter, the individualism with which their critics have tried to harness them.

Concluding reections
So the redirection of our attention to Hellenistic ethics and, more generally, to the concept of philosophy as care of the self that it presumes and fosters suggests that we review the cognate insights of existentialist thinkers in our own day. But before slipping into an easy accommodation with philosophers whom many have grown accustomed to dismiss as fuzzy or given to hyperbole and histrionics, let us test the ground by soberly considering some of the problems such a mixed marriage might engender. At least three such problems suggest themselves. (1) The role of reective critical and self-critical inquiry in such a quasi-existentialist conception of philosophy as care of the self seems to be seriously weakened if not relinquished entirely. Does the ancient counsel repeated from Plato onward to judge from the impersonal, universal perspective of Reason sufce to preserve this critical function? In other words, is the theoretical/practical distinction so widespread in

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present-day academic philosophy still valid? Hadot concedes that the concept of philosophy as a way of life includes linkage with a certain kind of discourse: One should no longer oppose way of life and discourse as if they corresponded to practice and theory. Discourse can have a practical aspect insofar as it tends to produce an effect in the listener or reader. And style of life, evidently can be not theoretical but contemplative.20 But the nature of that relationship is left vague. Indeed, despite his respect for the Stoic (Aurelian) model mentioned earlier, he betrays a certain sympathy for the non-discursive and the lived with such remarks as Philosophical discourse takes its origin in a choice of life and an existential option, not the reverse (Hadots Questce que la philosophie antique? [hereafter PA], p. 18) and one must recognize that the philosophers choice of life determines his discourse (PA 21). And this plunges us into the midst of the paradox of KierkegaardianSartrean fundamental option or criterion-constituting choice, with its charges of decisionism and/or irrationalism. (2) The contextualist nature of this so-called Socratic rubric seems to have brought in its wake a corresponding abdication in favor of the natural and human sciences of responsibility for the kind of questions traditionally addressed by philosophy whether in terms of metaphysical or at least epistemological and methodological considerations. Think of the sociology of knowledge, for example, or cultural studies, or the various cosmologies that have sprung up with the advance of space research. In other words, it threatens to make contemporary philosophy adjectival to the human sciences, as the recent appearance of philosophical counseling attests. Philosophy as therapy, as life-choice, as walking the walk, seems to be a reasonable translation of philosophy as a way of life in this Socratic mode. Indeed, one must not forget that the ancient sage was doctor (medicus) as well as enlightener. In Wittgensteinian terms, his judgments were as much therapeutic as epistemic in nature and intent. (3) One immediately encounters the ambiguity of the spiritual as distinct from the religious in such a contrast. This applies to both Foucaults and Hadots uses of the term spiritual. The view of philosophy as a way of life and its practice as requiring technologies of the self (Foucault) or spiritual exercises (Hadot) demands a clearer articulation of the religious than is found in this conversation as presently pursued. For example, Hadot, appealing to the Roman connection between religion and civic obligation, associates religion with rite and ritual and is critical of philosophers like Proclus or Auguste Comte who would mesh it with philosophy. In fact, he propounds such spiritual exercises as affording those who cannot or do not want to live a religious mode of life the possibility of choosing a purely philosophical way of life (PV 68). This bivalence of the religious and the non-religious

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styles of life mirrors the existentialist movement as it has developed historically. That Hadot could attend the exclusive Vendredis de Gabriel Marcel in the mid-1940s where Christian existentialism was being promoted and Sartrean nihilism was under attack and yet champion the Nietzschean, Epicurean and generally pagan dimension of spirituality exemplies the ambiguities of the spiritual/religious distinction. But Foucault, perhaps because of the inuence of Georges Dumzil and the comparativist study of mythology and symbol, takes a more farranging approach to the topic when he discusses it obliquely, if at all. As we have seen, Foucault offers a tentative denition of spirituality as the subjects attainment of a certain mode of being and the transformations that the subject must carry out on itself to attain this mode of being. He adds his belief that spirituality and philosophy were identical or nearly identical in ancient spirituality and asserts that philosophys most important preoccupation centered around the self, with knowledge [connaissance] of the world coming after and serving, most often, to support the care of the self (EW 1: 294). His view of the religious aspect of spirituality focuses on the introduction of Text, Word and subsequently Law into the practices by which subjects were formed and truth attained. As Law came to predominate, a particular kind of subject was constituted and spiritual exercises were subsumed into disciplines. The modern, secular self is born. It is against the limits of that self and the identity imposed upon it that the existentialists rebelled. Foucaults appeal to an aesthetics of existence and to the Nietzschean project of making ones life a work of art is not the promotion of yet another formula to supplant a currently established one. Similarly, his genealogical counsel to resist or dismantle the apparatus by which the modern disciplines have constituted the individuals that we are, though it resonates with the Marxian prescription of a potential change in human nature, is more a modest indicator of the current problem than the proposal of a denitive solution. He often insisted that his was not the role of telling us how to live our lives. Rather, as he famously called for the destruction of the anthropological quadrilateral that established the grid by which the modern subject perceives and conceives the world, so his appeal to aesthetics is just a hypothesis for testing these limits to discover where the through path lies along which we are once more able not only to think but to act. Habermas understandably dismissed this as anarchism. But Foucault would see it as thinking against oneself (se dprendre de soi-mme); again, the ethics of an intellectual in our day. Just as the work of MacIntyre and others in the 1960s and 1970s called us back to an ancient but largely neglected tradition in ethical discourse, so the later writings of Foucault and those of Hadot reintroduce into the philosophical discussion a hitherto marginalized conception of

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the nature of philosophy itself. The challenge which such a view offers our professional habits and practices is not without its problems. I have mentioned three such by way of conclusion. But I have also suggested that such difculties are not insurmountable. Rather, they invite serious discussion as one is challenged to renew, if not to revive, the ancient view of philosophy as a way of life in pursuit of wisdom. Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

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Notes
1 Plato, Laches, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 165 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), p. 39 (188 DE). 2 See Michel Foucault, Essential Works, ed. Paul Rabinow, 3 vols (New York: New Press, 1997), 1:281 and 3:253; hereafter cited as EW, plus volume and page numbers; as well as Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, Vol. 3 of his The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 11. 3 Michel Foucault, Omnes et Singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason, in EW, 3:323. 4 For a brief discussion of the Platonic authorship of this dialogue, see Michel Foucault, Hermneutique du sujet: Cours du Collge de France, 19811982 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2001), p. 77, n. 12; hereafter cited as HS, plus page number. 5 Posterior Analytics 81b 5 (Book I, ch. 18). 6 See Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1975). Though this is a general thesis of the book, see especially p. 126ff. 7 See Sren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientic Postscript, trans. Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 189ff. Frdric Gros claims that Foucault was an avid reader of Kierkegaard (see HS 25 n. 46). 8 Though Foucault explicitly excluded from this reciprocity Aristotle, whom he characterizes as always the exception to generalizations in ancient philosophy, one cannot ignore the Stagirites account of the virtuous person becoming so by practicing the acts that dene the virtuous person. Of course, Aristotle will try to avoid circularity by appeal to the metaphysics of potency and act. But this may simply move the circularity back one step in the process. Here too one is dealing with the ancient paradox of becoming what you are. 9 For a thorough discussion of this topic see the following: Michel Foucault, Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (London: Routledge, 1999); Jeremy R. Carrette, Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality (London: Routledge, 2000); and Michel Foucault and

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Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience, ed. James Bernauer and Jeremy Carrette (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2004). The Discourse on Language, appendix to The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1972), p. 235. See Pierre Hadot, La Philosophie comme manire de vivre (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001), p. 214; hereafter cited as PV. Published in Michel Foucault, Philosopher, trans. Timothy J. Armstrong (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 22531; hereafter cited as MFP. Pierre Hadot: histoire du souci, interview with Franois Ewald, Magazine littraire 345 (juilletaot, 1996): 19. As a matter of proper textual interpretation regarding the identication of Platonic self-knowledge and sophrosune (sound-mindedness), see Helen North, Sophrosune Self-Knowledge and Self-Restraint in Greek Literature : (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966). Pierre Hadot, Eloge de Socrate (Paris: Editions Allia, 1998) and Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique, 3rd edn, augmented (Paris: Institut dtudes augistiniennes, 1992). See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1973), p. 377. Michel Foucault, Le Souci de la vrit, interview with Franois Ewald, Magazine littraire 207 (mai, 1984): 22. Michel Foucault, On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress, Afterword (1983) to Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn, enlarged (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 237; reprinted in EW 1:262. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, in Walter Kaufmann (ed.) Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, Meridian Books, 1956), p. 305. Pierre Hadot, Quest-ce que la philosophie antique? (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 20; hereafter cited as PA.

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