Università “La Sapienza” di Roma
Dottorato di ricerca in Filosofia
Ciclo XXII,
Anno accademico 2011-2012
PHILOSOPHY AS TRANSFORMATION OF THE SELF
IN FOUCAULT AND MURDOCH
Supervisore e Co-Supervisori : Candidata :
Prof. Piergiorgio Donatelli Catherine Bearfield
Prof. Emidio Spinelli
Prof. Francesco Saverio Trincia
Abbreviations
Abbreviations for Foucault’s and Murdoch’s own works, and a few others, are given below. Any other abbreviations are normally explained on their first occurrence.
Foucault:
The History of Sexuality:
WK Vol.I The Will to Knowledge, London: Penguin, 1998
UP Vol.II The Uses of Pleasure, London: Penguin, 1992
CS Vol.III The Care of the Self, London: Penguin, 1990
Courses at the Collège de France:
A Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-75, London: Verso, 2003
BB The Birth of Biopolitics,Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-79, London: Palgrave
Macmillan 2008
CT The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de
France, 1983-84, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.Translation of:
CV Le courage de la veritè, Cours au Collège de France, 1984: Le Gouvernement de soi et
des autres II, Paris: Gallimard Seuil, 2009.
GSA Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, Cours au Collège de France, 1982-83, Paris:
Gallimard Seuil, 2008.
HS The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-82, New York:
Picador, 2005
STP Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78,New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007
Other Books and essays by Foucault:
DE Dits et écrits, 4 vols. Ed. Daniel Defert et al, Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1994.
DP Discipline and Punish, New York: Pantheon, 1977
M&C Les mots et les choses, Paris: Gallimard, 1966
NGH “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, in Bouchard, D.F., ed., Language, Countermemory,
Practice, Ithaca, N.Y.: CornellUniversity Press, 1977.
NSR “Non au sexe-roi”, in DE, pp.256-79
OT The Order of Things, London: Routledge Classics, 2002
The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, (CCF),New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2003
AI Whitebook, J, “Against Interiority: Foucault’s Struggle with Psychoanalysis”, pp. 312-48
AF Han, Beatrice, “The Analytic of Finitude”, pp. 176-209
EAF Davidson, A. “Ethics as Aesthetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient
Thought”, pp. 123-48
FEHN Sluga, Hans, “Foucault’s Encounter with Heidegger and Nietzsche”, pp.210-40
FMH Flynn, T., “Foucault’s Mapping of History”, pp.29-49
ICCF Gutting, G., “Introduction: Michel Foucault: A User’s Manual”, pp. 1-28
MFEI Bernauer, J. & Mahon, M., “Michel Foucault’s Ethical Imagination”, pp. 149-175
PM Rouse, J., “Power/Knowledge”, pp. 95-122
Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984,(EWF1), ed. Rabinow, P., London: Penguin, 2000
ECS “The Ethics of the Concern for the Self as a Practice of Freedom”, pp.281-302
FWL “Friendship as a Way of Life.” pp. 135-40
ISR “Interview by Stephen Riggins”, pp. 121-34
OGE “On the Genealogy of Ethics”, pp. 253-80
PHS “Preface to The History of Sexuality, Volume 2”, pp. 199-206
SCSA “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act”, pp. 141-56
S&S “Sexuality and Solitude”, pp. 175-84
STSW “The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will”, pp. 157-162
TS “Technologies of the Self”, pp. 223-52
WE “What is Enlightenment?”, pp. 303-20
WKI “The Will to Knowledge: Introduction to the 1970-1971 Course at the Collège de
France, pp. 11-16
Other books and articles on Foucault
BSH Dreyfus, H., and Rabinow, P., Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton, UK:
Harvester Press, 1982.
FFE Veyne, P., “The Final Foucault and his Ethics”, in: Foucault and his Interlocutors,
ed. A. Davidson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 225-33
Works by Iris Murdoch:
For essays published in Existentialists and Mystics (E&M) and elsewhere, page references are given only for this publication. For Iris Murdoch, Philosopher, ed. J. Broackes, Oxford University Press, 2011, references are given to this as (IMP). For essays published in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, ed. Antonaccio, M., & Schweiker, W., 1996, University of Chicago Press, references are given as in (IMSHG).
AD “Against Dryness” (1961), E&M 287-95
BP, The Black Prince, London: Vintage Books, 2006
DPR “The Darkness of Practical Reason” (1966), E&M 193-202
EM “Existentialists and Mystics” (1970), E&M 221-235
E&M Existentialists and Mystics(1977), ed. P. Conradi
F&S “The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists” E&M 386-463
HMD “Hegel in Modern Dress” (1957), E&M 146-50
IP “The Idea of Perfection” (1964), E&M 299-366
KV “Knowing the Void” (1956), E&M 157-60
LP “Literature and Philosophy: A conversation with Bryan Magee” (1978) E&M 3-30
ME “Metaphysics and Ethics” (1975), E&M 59-76
MGM Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992)
NM “The novelist as a Metaphysician” (1950), E&M 101-7
NP “Nostalgia for the Particular” E&M 43-58
N&S Nuns and Soldiers, London: Vintage Books, 2001.
OGG “On God and Good” E&M 337 362
S&G “The Sublime and the Good” (1959), E&M 205-21
S&BR “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited” (1959), E&M 261-86
SGOC “The Sovereignty of Good over other Concepts” (1967), E&M 363-85
SRR Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953; 1999), Vintage, London
SW “Salvation by Words” (1972), E&M 235-242
SZ “Sein und Zeit: Pursuit of Being”, (2011), IMP 93-111
TL “Thinking and Language” (1951), E&M 33-42
UTN Under the Net,
VC “Vision and Choice in Morality” (1956), (with omissions) in E&M 76-98
Other works:
Iris Murdoch Philosopher, (IMP), ed. Broackes, J., Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2012 (IMP):
EML Bagnoli, C. “The Exploration of Moral Life”, pp. 197-226
FSK Nussbaum, M.,‘ “Faint with Secret Knowledge”: Love and Vision in Murdoch’s
The Black Prince,’ pp. 135-54
IM&E Moran, R. ‘Iris Murdoch and Existentialism’, pp. 181-96
INV Crisp, Roger, ‘Iris Murdoch on Nobility and Moral Value’ (2011) in IMP 275-293
PEMM Denham, A.E., “Psychopathy, Empathy and Moral Motivation”, pp. 325-352
Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, eds. Antonaccio, M., Schweiker,W.,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996
L&V Nussbaum, M., ‘Love and Vision: Iris Murdoch on Eros and the Individual’ pp.29-53
IMPP Taylor, C. ‘Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy’ pp. 3-28
WPM Diamond, C. “ ‘We are Perpetually Moralists’: Iris Murdoch, Fact and Value, pp. 79-119
V&R McDowell, J., “Virtue and Reason”, in Virtue Ethics, ed. Darwall, S., Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003
Works by Stanley Cavell:
CW Cities of Words, CambridgeMassachusetts: Belknap, HarvardUniversity Press, 2005
MMWS Must We Mean What We Say, CambridgeUniversity Press, 1969
QO In Quest of the Ordinary, University of Chicago Press, 1988
Works by Wittgenstein:
CV Culture and Value,Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980
PI Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell Paperbacks, 1974
TLP Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Oxford: Routledge Classics, 2001
Hadot, Pierre:
IC The Inner Citadel,Cambridge Mass-Lon: HarvardUniversity Press, 2001, (1992)
PWL Philosophy as a Way of Life, Ed. Davidson, A., Oxford: Blackwell, 1995
WAPWhat is Ancient Philosophy?, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap, Harvard, 2002 (1995)
Other works:
HO Hacking, I Historical Ontology, HarvardUniversity Press, 2002
IML Conradi, Peter J., Iris Murdoch: A Life, London: Harper Collins, 2001.
TD Nussbaum, M., The Therapy of Desire, PrincetonUniversity Press, Princeton, 1994
V&R McDowell, J., “Virtue and Reason”, in Virtue Ethics, ed. Darwall, S.,, 2003, Oxford:
Blackwell, Oxford, pp.121-44
Page
Introduction 7
Part I Foucault.
Ch. 1. Knowledge, Power, and finally, the Subject 12
- From objectification to subjectivation
- Discursive practice and the formless subject
- The pre-constituted and the self-constituting subject
- The ancient and the modern subject
- The divided subject of knowledge and of ethics
- Forms of reflexivity
Ch. 2 The Genealogy of Ethics 37
1. The disembodied subject
2. Ethical configurations
3. Moral code, moral practice
4. The hermeneutics of desire
5. Homo Psychologicus
Ch. 3 Body and Soul 58
- The Spirit and the Flesh,
- Cognitive passions
- Appetites and Instincts
- Desires and pleasures (antiquity)
5. Forms of sexuality
6. Love, beauty, sōphrosynē
Ch.4 Bodies and Pleasures 91
- The history of sexuality
- Bodies and pleasures (modernity)
3. Queering the self
4 Theory and practice
5 Liberation and self-construction
Ch.5. The Aesthetics of existence 113
- Love and friendship
- The self in San Francisco
- Asceticism and ascesis
- An aesthetics of existence
- Stoic intellectualism
Ch. 6 The Hermeneutics of the Subject 135
1. Homo Antiquus
2. Prosoche - Attention to the Self
3. Stoic reason and providence
4. Conversion to Self
5. Parrhesia
Part II
Ch. 1 The Subject of Knowledge and the Subject of Ethics 181
- Fact and Value
- Moral concepts
- Language and Experience
Ch.2 Moral Being 212
- Philosophical Pictures of the Self
- Will, Imagination and Freedom
- Existentialism
- Wording the world.
Ch.3 The Good 257
- Life Goods and Constitutive Goods
- Good: Real: Love
- Unselfing
Conclusion 294
Bibliography 307
Philosophy as Transformation of the Self
Introduction: Foucault, Murdoch and Philosophy.
[F]or what is ethics, if not the practice of freedom, the conscious [réflechie] practice of freedom?” (Foucault, ECS, 284).
Morality is after all the great central arena of human life and the abode of freedom. (Murdoch, SRR, 31-32)
Not much of the philosophy of the twentieth century could be said to be concerned with the transformation of the self. The work of Michel Foucault and Iris Murdoch, in very different ways, was, or came to be. Both had begun their work however, in a twentieth century dominated by what was known as “the linguistic turn” in both continental and Anglo-Saxon philosophy, by exploring the relation of language and experience; though from the beginning, each of them took a critical stance to their respective traditions. Foucault, in a much quoted passage from The Uses of Pleasure, puts together two questions as if the one followed smoothly from the other; but in effect, the conceptual space between these two questions marks both the turn about to take place in his own philosophical practice, and the gulf between his changing conception of philosophy and the more mainstream conceptions he was implicitly challenging. He writes:
what therefore is philosophy today – I mean philosophical activity – if it is not the critical work of thought on itself? And if it does not consist in undertaking to know how and to what extent it would be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what one already knows? (UP, 16)
The first of these two questions would make no waves among the communities of academic philosophers today who see philosophy as a profession, not necessarily as an activity permeating their way of life; while the second, which prima facie seems to merely clarify the first, in fact suggests that philosophical practice might radically transform one’s life, might serve precisely that purpose, if, that is, as he goes on to say, “the living body of philosophy […] is still now what it was in the past, that is to say an ‘ascesis’, an akèsis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought.” (Ibid.)“Ascesis”, even when defined as an exercise of oneself in thought, does not succeed in shaking off all sorts of connotations in which thought is situated in practices that the professional philosopher of today would find completely alien, and of which Foucault, never one to use a term lightly, is more than aware; his own studies had always involved meticulous (“archeological”) attention to concepts, and to the historical correlates of their various connotations. His work had led to considerable insight into the way in which the thought of the individual is shaped by the practices that determine what counts as “knowledge” in any given field, at any given time, and had instigated upheavals in the academic disciplines the work touched on; but it had not led to an investigation of subjectivity, let alone to an “ascesis”.
As he turned his attention away from the ways in which our thought and lives are “objectified” by discursive practices, to use his own terms, to what he calls “subjectivation”; the “subject”, having a degree of freedom that will be circumscribed in a number of ways, moves to a more central place in Foucault’s thinking, in the first instance through an analysis of power and its counterpart – resistance. For a period of time – the middle, “genealogical” period in Foucault’s work – he dedicated his time to how this story, essentially that of the possibility of thinking differently, played out in various “games of truth” and practices of modernity. But freedom as resistance is just one form of freedom, and one that is reactive, tied as it is to the discourses and practices of one’s time and place; and as his interest in freedom deepened, his need to study other notions of freedom, and other practices of philosophical freedom, led him to the only secular place where a wealth of such practices are to be found, to the philosophy of Antiquity, where none of the practices of one’s life could be excluded from philosophy, and where all the practices of one’s life were philosophical practices.
Against this ancient conception, what Foucault calls “the modern age of the history of truth” begins, he says, when “what gives access to truth, the condition for the subject’s access to the truth, is knowledge (connaissance) and knowledge alone […] That is to say, it is when the philosopher (or the scientist, or simply someone who seeks the truth) can recognize the truth and have access to it in himself and solely through his activity of knowing, without anything else being demanded of him and without him having to change or alter his being as a subject.” (HS, 17) What he is describing here “is a form of reflexivity that makes it possible to fix the certainty that will serve as a criterion for all possible truth and which, starting from this fixed point, will advance from truth to truth up to the organization and systematization of an objective knowledge.” (Ibid. 460) This form of reflexivity that Foucault calls “method” is grounded in the conviction that objective knowledge is possible, and that in self-knowledge, in a certain sense, objective and subjective knowledge must come together. Orthodox at least in this, Foucault says that the first clear formulation of “the certainty that will serve as a criterion for all possible truth” is Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum; one of the few philosophical statements, in Latin at that, that have attained iconic status in the modern era of “the history of truth”.
Foucault’s own earlier studies in and on this era of “method”, which in recognition of Nietzsche’s influence, he calls genealogies, took the form of analyses of the way in which new concepts and entire disciplines arise in response to historically specific conditions; of how the separate disciplinary practices in which knowledge is elaborated are interlinked; and of how they in turn create new “objective” filters through which we read ourselves. Underlying this disciplinary diversity is revealed, as a kind of epistemological style of the modern era, the depth of this conviction that truth can indeed be accessed by intellectual effort, and appropriate “method” alone. It is Foucault’s clear understanding (and substantial and explicit demonstration) of the illusion of an objectivity untainted by subjective, or intersubjective, notions or habits of thought, that first led him to his enquiry into subjectivation, that is, to those practices through which the self constitutes itself as moral subject. Foucault’s term “subjectivation” connotes the active nature of the process by which the individual becomes a moral subject. In shaping the raw material of myself into a moral subject, some form of inner change is therefore implicit: “There is no single moral action without reference to the unity of moral conduct; no moral conduct that does not require the constitution of the self as moral subject; no constitution of a moral subject without modes of subjectivation and without an ‘ascetics’ or ‘practices of the self’ to sustain it.” (UP, 15)
At a certain point, in need of exemplification of self-formative practices that had fallen into disuse in the modern era, Foucault turned to an examination of the reflexivity of a previous era, that of “meditation”, as he describes it, in Antiquity. This, he says, is a form of reflexivity which “carries out the test of what one thinks, the test of oneself as the subject who actually thinks what he thinks and acts as he thinks, with the object of the subject’s transformation and constitution as, let’s say, the ethical subject of truth” (Ibid.) His long engagement with some of the major developments of this form of reflexivity in Antiquity, and its repercussions on his later reflections on the possibilities of a philosophy for modernity will be examined here.
Iris Murdoch meanwhile writes, in another philosophical language:
“I think philosophy is very counter-natural, it is a very odd unnatural activity.[…] Philosophy disturbs the mass of semi-aesthetic conceptual habits on which we normally rely. Hume said that even the philosopher, when he leaves his study, falls back upon these habitual assumptions.
[…] Philosophy involves seeing the absolute oddity of what is familiar and trying to formulate really probing questions about it.” (Murdoch, LP, 8)
Hume’s cheerful acceptance (after his moment of deep crisis) of the disparity between the philosopher’s “truth” in his study and the semi-aesthetic conceptual habits on which we normally rely, had, according to Murdoch, a profound influence on philosophy in the British (and later also American) tradition in which she was trained; an influence which tended to circumscribe certain areas of human life as those on which philosophy could legitimately operate, and others as beyond its scope or interest. When Murdoch arrived on the British philosophical scene in the 1940s “philosophy” was largely treated as coinciding with “logic”, and “ethics” tended to be seen as a kind of annexed area of application. There was a certain Enlightenment optimism in this, in the belief that extending the reign of logic was an ethical priority, that through the gradual extension of “certain knowledge” and rational thinking to ever greater numbers of persons and domains, the array of semi-aesthetic conceptual habits, susceptible as they are to mythological narrative and other “nonsense”, would slowly diminish, replaced by rationally governed notions and human relations. Such reliance on the gradual rationalisation of human interaction led to codified forms of morality, what McDowell has called an “outside-in”[1] view of morality, which Murdoch did not share; or rather she agreed that moral codes were necessary, but not that they in any way exhausted the requirements of ethics. She saw this faith in the power of rationality as one that completely leaves out of account the self-centred egoism of the human individual (hard to deny empirically, whatever the “causes”), and its capacity to twist any narrative in its own favour, often quite unconsciously; a reason for which she, and McDowell in a different way, see the need for what he calls an inside-out moral perspective, and therefore forms of self-related moral practice. The forms of such practice Murdoch puts forward may, and in some respects do, correspond to what Foucault calls ascesis, and defines as an exercise of oneself in thought; though for Murdoch the elaboration of such practices requires some form of moral psychology, whereas Foucault went to considerable pains to refute this idea, as we will see.
The conflict between Murdoch’s induction into modern philosophy and (as a student of Classical studies at Oxford) her first encounter with ancient philosophy, could not have been greater; but whereas many of her contemporaries resolved the problem by reading the ancient philosophers through the spectacles of contemporary epistemological criteria, thereby consigning them to current historical irrelevance, for Murdoch the problems went much deeper.Entering into the way of thinking of ancient philosophy, essentially of Plato, enabled her to view analytic philosophy from the outside, as it were; to see it, that is, as what Wittgenstein called a “limited whole”, or a particular unified vision; and to see it as one among others, perhaps with profound insights, butwith no infallible claim to truth. It was Wittgenstein’s elucidation of the ultimate impossibility of grounding any kind of metaphysical foundation in philosophy, including the one he had himself elaborated in the Tractatus, that provided her with the theoretical instruments necessary to elaborate the position she was herself seeking to articulate; and gave her also its central metaphor for philosophical systems in general, that of “pictures”, of ways of “picturing” the world. But whereas Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, focused on logic, and on the logical “pictures” we create to render orderly our experience of the world, Murdoch believed that our aesthetic sense of our world was equally fundamental. And yet the study of aesthetics, as with ethics, had been largely sidelined in mainstream philosophy. For Murdoch, to see is to evaluate, to be in the world is to evaluate – the descriptions we give ourselves of our world are constantly evaluative, that is to say that “good” and “bad”, as both aesthetic and moral judgement, are integral to our thinking, to the point that, she writes, “language itself is a moral medium, almost all uses of language convey value. This is one reason why we are almost always morally active. Life is soaked in the moral, literature is soaked in the moral.” (LP, 27) The problem, of course, is that so often we are, quite casually, immorally active, in myriad ways, big and small (a generous action does not come from an irritated mind, for example). Murdoch saw self-centredness, absorption in our own fantasies, as the crucial moral problem. Therefore, she writes: