Notes on Care of Self

In Michel Foucault's lectures from the Collège de France (1981-1982) he tries to elaborate on a strand of Greek philosophy that dropped away from everyday use sometime around the second century, C.E. This strand is something called "care of self" and it shows up alongside the more familiar "know thyself" dictum ostensibly enunciated by Socrates and made famous by Plato in his dialogues. Foucault points out that both Descartes' philosophy and Christian theology helped to erase the potency of "care of self" by designing, though Foucault doesn't say this explicitly, instrumental uses for the term "know thyself." It is easiest to see this in Descartes, since his "I think therefore I am" required a kind of knowing oneself, but it was one that had the purpose of understanding and categorizing the world in which one lived. The cogito ergo sum developed in tandem with a mathesis of the world, or a type of ordering that sought to put everything in its right place. Very briefly, for those who aren't familiar with the critiques of Descartes philosophy, the problem with "I think therefore I am" is that the "I" tends to go untroubled, as if there just is an empirical subject that has the ability to order things. This leads to a rigid distinction between subject and object, which leads to other trouble involving objectification of certain subjects, or, to put it another way, the development of a social hierarchy in which certain people are less than others. In terms of Christianity, the care of self becomes tied up in a very specific notion of confession, one that sees the confessing subject as someone who needs to purify him or herself so as to become a better person. The standard against which one was judged in these confessions was, of course, the word of God, or actually the interpretation of the word of God by trusted figures (priests) who oversaw the truth-speaking of the confessing subject. Against the grain of these traditions, Foucault tries to show how the "know thyself" that became a scientific method for categorizing the world was actually more of a structural support of care of the self, which was basically a practice performed between two people that had as its end the development of a certain ethos, or an ethical mode of conduct in the world. Foucault argues that, and notwithstanding that there were differences between the two perspectives, the complexities of that care of self practiced by the Greeks and then the Romans dropped out as time went by. This was basically the erasure of a philosophical reflection of the subject that produced a much more nuanced intertwining of subject and object.

Basically, care of the self, as Foucault tries to show, was at one point an ethics of speaking and acting truthfully all the time. The point of speaking and acting truthfully was not just personal, it also had to do with the community in which one lived or, as was usually the case, the community which one governed. More interesting for me than the Prince-public relationship, which is one relationship where Foucault sees a use of this care of self, is the teacher-student relationship. What's the point of speaking-truthfully? In the teacher-student relationship the point of speaking truthfully is to encourage a type of confession from the student. This is not a confession like that in the Christian tradition but, rather, a confession of what one thinks at a particular time and in a particular space. (For those who are interested, this particular time and place is kairos: a type of situation that erupts in the present). This "what one thinks" is equal to the "truth," but specifically the "truth" that the student has in that time and place and not an eternal truth that should remain unchanged or revered. The Socratic dialogue would then unfold after that stating of the truth, a dialogue in which the student would realize that he or she doesn't know what he or she thought he or she knew, but that, in fact, he or she does know other things. Those other things are usually things like, "I now know that I don't know anything," but, as was the case with Socrates himself, that type of knowledge was incredibly important. Consequently, and I fully believe that this has complete relevance in the present day, "learning" has nothing to do with "getting" the intended meaning of an author, or of discovering an answer to some question. Instead, students should use the in-class experience and the experience of reading and writing to develop a sense of the world.

As a teacher, I find all of this to be so important today. This idea of learning as the development of a sense of the world and of composing an ethical practice is something almost completely absent from the mindset of students I have taught. The word "sense" in English usually carries two meanings. The first is that found in "common sense," or a certain know-how that people gain through living life. The second is a tactile sense, like seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching. The third meaning of sense, however, the one that shows up in French and Italian, has to do with direction. A professor I had summed this up by quoting the Italian expression of "What is the sense of this road? [Qual'è il senso di questa strada?]," which means "what direction does this road run in?" This meaning of sense, when applied to this notion of learning as the practice of getting a sense of the world, leads to a "sense" defined as a feel for the movement of things. This movement of things and, more importantly, the mode of being that one cultivates in order to insert oneself into this moving world, is something with which all students must contend if they want to develop an ethical engagement with the world. This is what I try to teach.