Freedom, truth, and possibility in Foucault's Ethics

Foucault Studies

Volumn , Issue 3, 2005, Pages 49-64

  Fillion, Réal ^a  

^a Universite of Sudbury   (Canada)

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EID: 84891805218     PISSN: None     EISSN: 18325203     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.22439/fs.v0i3.872     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. Paul Rabinow, "Introduction: The History of Systems of Thought," in Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954 - 1984, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 1997), xxvi.
2. Paul Veyne, "The Final Foucault and his Ethics." Critical Inquiry 20 (Autumn 1993), 2.
3. Michel Foucault, "On the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress", in Foucault, Ethics, 266, my emphasis.
4. Michel Foucault, "Preface to The History of Sexuality Volume Two", in Foucault, Ethics, 199.
5. Foucault, "Preface", 200.
6. As he himself famously put it in the Introduction to The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 8: "As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient. It was curiosity - the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself.
7. For an excellent discussion of how Foucault's concern with "ethics" is continuous with his more explicitly political considerations, cf. Jean-François Pradeau, "Le sujet ancien d'une éthique moderne. À propos des exercices spirituels anciens dans l'Histoire de la sexualité de Michel Foucault" in Frédéric Gros (coor.) Foucault : le courage de la vérité (Paris : Presses universitaires de France, 2002), 131-154. Pradeau also makes the case that Foucault was perhaps less successful in this exploration than is sometimes assumed by his supporters.
8. May quite convincingly argues, it seems to me, that if we return to Foucault's histories - especially Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish - it is because they do not only instruct us about past practices and thereby throw light on present practices; they actually serve "as reminders of who we are and how we got to be that way, and, even more important, of the contingency of both. We might return to Foucault's histories for much the same reason Marcus Aurelius returns to the truths of Stoicism in his meditations: to keep calling ourselves back to what we need to remember in order to construct a meaningful life in a world that often pulls us in unhelpful directions." Todd May, "Philosophy as a Spiritual Exercise in Foucault and Deleuze." Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 5, No. 2 (August 2000), 227.
9. Cf., William E. Connolly, "Beyond Good and Evil: The Ethical Sensibility of Michel Foucault," Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 3 (1993), 365-389
10. as well as The Ethos of Pluralization. (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1995). It should be mentioned that the "sensibility" Connolly articulates is as much inspired by Nietzsche as it is by Foucault, such that it describes less a "Foucauldianism" than, as Connolly himself puts it, a "Fou-connoism." (368) Needless to say, this is no way diminishes its significance and importance.
11. Cf. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward, (New York: Verso, 2001), especially Chapter 3.
12. The sense Badiou gives to nihilism has to do with the way contemporary "ethics," in its dismissal of both the precedence of Good over Evil and the affirmation of Truths, merely focuses its efforts on suffering and death. For a good discussion of how Badiou's work can be seen as intersecting with Foucault's, cf., David Pekerow, "The Evental Site of Resistance: Badiou as Supplement to Foucault." www.sspp.us/Protected-Essays/2004-APA- Pekerow.doc
13. Immanuel Kant, "What is Enlightenment?" in Kant On History, ed. Lewis White Beck, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1963), 3-10.
14. Foucault, "What is Enlightement?", 306.
15. Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy, 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 59.
16. Foucault, of course, is hardly alone in this; for a good discussion of how Foucault's concern with ethics relates to Lacan's similar critique of Kant, cf., John Rajchman, Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the Question of Ethics. (New York: Routledge, 1991), especially, 55-61.
17. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley. (New York: Pantheon, 1985).
18. For a more extensive discussion of the arguments in the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality in connection with the themes of this paper, cf., my "Foucault on History and the Self." Laval Théologique et Philosophique, Vol. 54, No. 1 (1998), 143-162.
19. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 92.
20. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. (New York: Vintage, 1990).
21. William E. Connolly, The Augustinian Imperative: A Reflection on the Politics of Morality, (London: Sage, 1993), 35.
22. Connolly, The Augustinian Imperative, 35.
23. Cf.,Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), especially chapter 10.
24. Charles Taylor, "Foucault on Freedom and Truth," in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 152-184;
25. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990;
26. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).
27. Michael J. Shapiro, "Affirming the Political: Tragic Affirmations versus Gothic Displacements," in The Politics of Moralizing, edited by Jane Bennett and Michael J. Shapiro, (New York: Routledge, 2002), 237.
28. Placing Foucault within a Hegelian orbit will no doubt be hotly contested by many Foucauldians (including Connolly), but I think needlessly so. Foucault is not Deleuze; his unflagging commitment to a thinking informed by history cannot help maintaining some common ground with Hegel. I develop some of this common ground in my "Foucault after Hyppolite: Toward an A-theistic Theodicy." The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol XLIII, no. 1 (2005), 79-93.
29. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. A. Sheridan. (New York: Random House, 1970).
30. Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?", 315. My emphasis
31. in Hegel's Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1989), 541-550.
32. Cf., Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1989)
33. and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993).
34. I should note immediately that the appeal to Hegel here is not the appeal that Žižek calls the "pseudo-Hegelian" critique, which in fact is not an advance on Kant as far as thinking through "ethics" is concerned. He writes: "According to the standard pseudo-Hegelian critique, the Kantian universalist ethic of the categorical imperative fails to take into account the concrete historical situation in which the subject is embedded, and which provides the determinate content of the Good: what eludes Kantian formalism is the historically specified particular Substance of ethical life. However, this reproach can be countered by claiming that the unique strength of Kant's ethics resides in this very formal indeterminacy: moral Law does not tell me what my duty is, it merely tells me that I should accomplish my duty, i.e., it is not possible to derive the concrete norms I have to follow in my specific situation from the moral Law itself-which means that the subject himself has to assume the responsibility of "translating" the abstract injunction of the moral Law into a series of concrete obligations." Slavoj Žižek, "Kant and Sade: The Ideal Couple." http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-kant-and-sade-the-ideal-couple.html
35. For good discussions of this reading, see Robert B. Pippin, "Naturalness and Mindedness: Hegel's Compatibilism." European Journal of Philosophy 7:2 (1999), 194-212;
36. Terry Pinkard, "Virtues, Morality, and Sittlichkeit: From Maxims to Practices." European Journal of Philosophy 7:2 (1999), 217-238;
37. and Robert Brandom, "Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel's Idealism." European Journal of Philosophy 7:2 (1999), 164-189.
38. Terry Pinkard, Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
39. The "paradox" is nicely captured by Kenneth Baynes in the following questions: "Doesn't a rule have to have a certain independence from my own will in order to bind my will? And if rules are thus independent doesn't that constitute a form of heteronomy?" Kenneth Baynes, "Freedom and Recognition in Hegel and Habermas." Philosophy & Social Criticism 28:1 (2002), 4.
40. Pinkard, German Philosophy, 285.
41. For a good discussion of Foucault's analytics of power as they relate to questions of normativity, cf., Kory P. Schaff, "Agency and Institutional Rationality: Foucault's Critique of Normativity." Philosophy & Social Criticism, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2004), 51-71.
42. Foucault is explicit about the connection between power and freedom: "Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are "free." By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several kinds of conduct, several ways of reacting and modes of behavior are available. Where the determining factors are exhaustive, there is no relationship of power: slavery is not a power relationship when a man is in chains, only when he has some possible mobility, even a chance of escape. (In this case it is a question of a physical relationship of constraint.) Consequently, there is not a face-to-face confrontation of power and freedom as mutually exclusive facts (freedom disappearing everywhere power is exercised), but a much more complicated interplay. In this game, freedom may well appear as the condition for the exercise of power (at the same time its precondition, since freedom must exist for power to be exerted, and also its permanent support, since without the possibility of recalcitrance power would be equivalent to a physical determination)." Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000), 342.
43. Compare Foucault's use of the notion of freedom here with Pippin's reading of Hegel: "freedom is understood by Hegel to involve a certain sort of self-relation and a certain sort of relation to others; it is constituted by being in a certain self-regarding and a certain mutually related state. Such states are active, involve deeds and practices, but are understood to be free by being undertaken in certain ways, not by having some special causal conditions." Robert B. Pippin, "What is the Question for which Hegel's "The Theory of Recognition is the Answer?" European Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2000), 156. I don't think it is much of a stretch to see in Foucault's "ethics" a movement of thought that resembles that of this "non-metaphysical" Hegel. If Foucault resists the notion of a state of "recognition," it is no doubt because it still rings too much of "reconciliation" with what is, something his commitment to "possibility" leads him to challenge. The emphasis on the constitutive role of events within this ontological/historical approach can also lead to a more sustained discussion of Badiou. However, I must leave that for another time.
44. Here is a sample of discussions showing Foucault's relevance to various institutional and practical dynamics: for health care and bioethics, cf., the special issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities, Vol. 24, Nos. 3-4 (2003);
45. for social work, cf., Adrienne S. Chambon, Allen Irving, Laura Epstein, eds., Reading Foucault for Social Work. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999);
46. for education, James D. Marshall, Michel Foucault: Personal Autonomy and Education. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996.