Aesthetics of self-fashioning and cosmopolitanism: Foucault and Rorty on the art of living

Philosophy Today

Volumn 46, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 185-192

  Abrams, Jerold J ^a  

^a CREIGHTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 4644337845     PISSN: 00318256     EISSN: 00318256     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/philtoday200246246     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. Karl-Otto Apel has initiated the synthesis between Peirce and Kant, transcendentalizing Peirce's semiotics in Charles S. Peirce: From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism, trans. J. M. Krois (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981)
2. Habermas' s reading of Peirce is set forth in "Peirce on Communication," in Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 88-112
3. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (1972-1977), ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 147. Foucault explains: "The principle was this. A perimeter building in the form of a ring. At the center of this, a tower, pierced by large windows opening on to the inner face of the ring. The outer building is divided into cells each of which traverses the whole thickness of the building. These cells have two windows, one opening on to the inside, facing the windows of the central tower, the other, outer one allowing daylight to pass through the whole cell. All that is then needed is to put an overseer in the tower in the tower and place in each of the cells a lunatic, a patient, a convict, a worker or a schoolboy. The back lighting enables one to pick out from the central tower the little captive silhouettes in the ring of cells. In short, the principle of the dungeon is reversed; daylight and the overseer's gaze capture the inmate more effectively than darkness, which afforded after all a sort of protection."
4. While the early works of Foucault are more socially and politically engaged, later works take a turn toward the self (not as a Cartesian static essence, but as something to be molded and created with style). Among these are The Care of the Self: History of Sexuality, vol. 3, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1986)
5. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, vol. 1 of The Essential Works of Michel Foucault (1954-1984) (New York: The New Press, 1994), especially "Technologies of the Self," pp. 223-51
6. Richard Shusterman, "Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57:3 (summer 1999): 299-313
7. See also Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York: Routledge, 1997)
8. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), especially Ch. 9, "Postmodern Ethics and the Art of Living"
9. and "Somaesthetics and the Care of the Self: The Case of Foucault," The Monist 83 (2001): 530-51
10. Alexander Nehamas's aestheticist Nietzscheanism is developed for example in "Nietzsche, modernity, aestheticism," collected in The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Kathleen Higgins and Bernd Magnus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 223-51
11. Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 318
12. Martha Nussbaum's book review, entitled "The Cult of Personality," analyzes Nehamas's The Art of Living, in The New Republic (January 4 and 11, 1999): 32-36
13. Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)
14. Nussbaum, "The Cult of Personality," p. 33
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (New York: Vintage, 1967). Consider Nietzsche's contrast between the herd morality as slave morality and the master morality of the nobles - obviously not entirely egalitarian
16. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), pp. 78-81
17. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 1995); p. 87, footnote 8
18. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967)
19. Rorty, Contingency, p. 83
20. Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy, p. 122
21. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, The Carus Lectures, 1988 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 1
22. See also Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994, 1996)
23. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, p. 1
24. Schusterman, Practicing Philosophy, p. 102
25. Rorty, "Religion as a Conversation-Stopper," in Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), pp. 168-74
26. Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam, "Epistemology as Hypothesis," in the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 28 (Fall 1990): 430
27. Hilary Putnam, "Between the New Left and Judaism," an interview with Hilary Putnam by Giovanna Borradori, collected in Borradori's The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Cavell, MacIntyre, and Kuhn, trans. Rosanna Crocitto (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 64