Why Western philosophy forgot Greek spirituality
And how Foucault retrieved it
The New Mindscape #T1–6.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault is best known for his hugely influential theories of power and domination in society. In his studies of modern discourses on madness, clinics, prisons, and government, he paints a dark picture of a world in which hidden forces of domination are everywhere, and shape our subjectivity even when we think we are free. It’s hard not to feel deeply cynical and pessimistic about the world after reading Foucault’s works.
But there’s another side to Foucault’s work, which is not so well known. In his later years, Foucault took a great interest in the different means by which the ethical life was cultivated among the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Christians. What he called the “care of the self” and the “technologies of the self” were the subjects of the second and third volumes in his History of Sexuality. Building on these materials, he undertook a monumental study of spirituality, which he taught in his lectures at the Collège de France in 1981–82. But this work has remained almost completely ignored. Perhaps this is because it was published almost two decades after his death, with the English translation, titled The Hermeneutics of the Subject, released only in 2005, long after the fad for “French theory” had abated in the anglophone humanities [1].
The 600-page volume discusses the discourses and techniques of spirituality, and their social practice, in the works of authors such as Plato, Seneca, Pliny, Seneca, Epicurius, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Gregory of Nyssa and so on. In this essay, my purpose is to briefly outline some of the key concepts, definitions, and analytical frameworks that guide Foucault’s study, and to reflect on how they can contribute more broadly to the study of spirituality.
Socrates’ mission
Foucault begins his first lecture with a discussion on the injunction of the Oracle at Delphi, “Know Thyself” (gnôthi seauthon). This is often taken as the basic question of the philosophy of the self in the Western philosophical tradition. But Foucault argues that, in fact, in Greek discourses the question of self-knowledge was not foundational but usually appeared in the context of a broader set of discourses and practices, which concerned the “care of the self” (epimeleia heautou). In fact, writes Foucault,
“we should not forget that in Plato’s too well-known but still fundamental text, the Apology, Socrates appears as the person whose essential, fundamental, and original function, job, and position is to encourage others to attend to themselves, take care of themselves, and not neglect themselves.” (p. 5)
In the Apology, Socrates states that the mission that his god has commanded him to carry out is to interpellate the Athenians:
“are you not ashamed for devoting all your care to increasing your wealth, reputation and honours, while not caring for or even considering your reason, truth and the constant improvement of your soul?” (pp. 5–6)
In Foucault’s analysis, there are three important aspects to Socrates’ mission: it is a divine mission that he will not give up; he puts it into practice by ignoring material concerns; the care of the self is a process of awakening; it is essential for the government of the city-state, even more so than an athlete’s victory at the Olympia (pp. 7–8, 491–492).
Socrates, claims Foucault, was not unique in his emphasis on the care of the self: this was a theme of discussions, reflections and practices throughout Greek, Hellenic and early Christian times, constituting a major cultural phenomenon that lasted over a thousand years.
With this theme of the care of the self, we have then, if you like, an early philosophical formulation, appearing clearly in the fifth century B.C., of a notion which permeates all Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman philosophy, as well as Christian spirituality, up to the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. In short, with this notion of epimeleia heautou we have a body of work defining a way of being, a standpoint, forms of reflection, and practices which make it an extremely important phenomenon not just in the history of representations, notions, or theories, but in the history of subjectivity itself or, if you like, in the history of practices of subjectivity. Anyway, as a working hypothesis at least, this one- thousand-year development from the appearance of the first forms of the philosophical attitude in the Greeks to the first forms of Christian asceticism — from the fifth century B.C.to the fifth century A.D. — can be taken up starting from this notion of epimeleia heautou. Between the philosophical exercise and Christian asceticism there are a thousand years of transformation and evolution in which the care of the self is undoubtedly one of the main threads or, at any rate, to be more modest, let’s say one of the possible main threads. (pp. 11–12)
Spirituality vs philosophy
Why, then, asks Foucault, has the “care of the self” receded from the preoccupations of Western philosophy? One reason, he speculates, might be that the idea of the “care of the self” sounds too self-centred, implying ignoring the affairs of the world, and forgetting moral and ethical concerns. But in fact, in antiquity the “care of the self” implied a discipline of self-control that was an essential prerequisite to contributing to the affairs of the family and of the polity.
Instead, Foucault considers that the side-lining began with the elaboration of a purely doctrinal theology in medieval times, which found its consummation in the “Cartesian moment” of a philosophy that is no longer concerned with the care and transformation of the self, but with propositional knowledge about the self. This has profound implications, and leads Foucault to identify the distinguishing features of the care of the self, which he calls “spirituality,” in contrast to “philosophy”:
We will call, if you like, “philosophy” the form of thought that asks, not of course what is true and what is false, but what determines that there is and can be truth and falsehood and whether or not we can separate the true and the false. We will call “philosophy” the form of thought that asks what it is that enables the subject to have access to the truth and which attempts to determine the conditions and limits of the subject’s access to the truth. If we call this “philosophy,” then I think we could call “spirituality” the search, practice, and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth. We will call “spirituality” then the set of these researches, practices, and experiences, which may be purifications, ascetic exercises, renunciations, conversions of looking, modifications of existence, etc., which are, not for knowledge but for the subject, for the subject’s very being, the price to be paid for access to the truth.” (p. 15)
Foucault then outlines three major characteristics of spirituality as it appears in antiquity:
1. The truth is not simply available to be known. One attains to the truth only through a process of modification, transformation, or conversion of one’s being.
2. There are two major means by which this transformation can take place. The first is erôs, love, in which the subject is transported away from his present status and drawn to the truth. The second is askêsis, ascesis, which is a personal effort of work on oneself, in which one takes responsibility for one’s own transformation.
3. Once the truth has been attained, there is a “rebound effect” of the truth on the subject. “The truth enlightens the subject; the truth gives beatitude to the subject; the truth gives the subject tranquility of the soul”. This effect “transfigures his very being”. (p. 16)
Elsewhere, Foucault defined the spiritual practices of the care of the self as actions “which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”[2]
These spiritual practices have, throughout history, constituted regimens for the “cultivation of the self”, which Foucault defined as
“an attitude, a mode of behaviour; it became instilled in ways of living; it evolved into procedures, practices, and formulas that people reflected on, developed, perfected, and taught. It thus came to constitute a social practice, giving rise to relationships between individuals, to exchanges and communications, and at times even to institutions. And it gave rise, finally, to a certain mode of knowledge and to the elaboration of a science.”[3]
Philosophy, with its question of “how can one access the truth?” and spirituality, with its concern for “how should one transform oneself in order to have access to the truth?” were inseparable in antiquity. It is in the modern era that these two concerns became separated from each other. In modernity, the truth came to be considered to be accessible by a simple act of knowledge. The knower is not required to undergo a self-transformation in order to access the truth, and the truth does not, in turn, transform the knower.
The only conditions for access to the truth — understood in modern times as scientific truth — are external: you need to have the right education, to have undergone the right scientific training, you need to follow some basic ethical norms of research, and so on. These are preconditions to accessing the truth, but they do not require the seeker after truth to undergo a transformation of their very being. In this, the reward or accomplishment of the search for truth is no longer an illumination or transfiguration, but simply the accumulation of new knowledge, which can continue indefinitely.
Thus, concludes Foucault, spirituality considers that we do not have immediate access to the truth, but it transforms us when we attain it. Modern Western philosophy, on the other hand, begins with the premise that we are all considered to have immediate access to the truth, but a truth that has no transformative power.
Socrates and Alcibiades
In his Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault frequently returns to one of Plato’s most important works, the Alcibiades, which seems to provide a paradigmatic account for his discussion of spirituality. It may be helpful, then, to consider it in some detail.
The work recounts a dialogue between Socrates and the young man Alcibiades. Alcibiades planned to get involved in politics, and to become a leader of the Athenian people. In the dialogue, Socrates asks Alcibiades in what way be is qualified to be a leader. Alcibiades thinks that he should be the leader because he’s handsome, wealthy, and born of a good family.
Socrates makes him realise that those are not the required qualities: justice is the key to the happiness of the city, and he knows nothing about justice. Therefore, Alcibiades knows nothing about leadership and politics.
Socrates explains to Alcibiades that the most important thing for him to be a leader is to know himself, and to take care of himself, to become a better person. But how do you know yourself? And how do you take care of yourself? How do you become a better person?
A knight knows how to ride a horse and how to become better in his horsemanship: there is such a thing as a good or a bad knight. A cobbler knows how to make shoes and how to become better at making shoes: there is such thing as a good or a bad cobbler.
But these are specific, specialised domains of knowledge. What is the more general domain within which one can be a good person, as opposed to simply good at riding horses or at making shoes? How do we know if someone is good or bad at being a person?
Through their discussion, Alcibiades and Socrates agree that it’s through dealing with other people in human relationships, through being a citizen in a community of people who meet to decide on their common affairs. To be a good person is to know how to deal with people and to manage the community’s affairs, such that friendship and concord among the people increase, and hatred and dissension decrease.
To increase this friendship and concord, says Socrates, it’s necessary to know and to care for your self. But we’re often mistaken when we think we know ourselves or care for ourselves. Very often, we think we are taking care of ourselves, when we are only taking care of the things we have.
For example, we have shoes. We can take care of our shoes, and there is a knowledge — the knowledge of the cobbler — which is the “science of shoes”. But this is not knowing and caring for yourself. And we have feet, on which we wear our shoes. Our feet are part of our body. Gymnastics, the “science of the body”, is the knowledge of caring for the body. And yet, if you know gymnastics, you still don’t know yourself, or how to take care of yourself.
All these things — your shoes, and your material possessions, and your feet, and all other parts of your body — are things you have, that you decide how to use. Who is this “you” — the “I” — that “has” these things and decides what to do with them, who “makes use of” your body and the things you own? This is your “self.”
For Socrates, a human being is composed of a governing component and a governed component — the “self” and the “body” respectively. The true self is also called the “soul.” And when two persons speak with each other and communicate, it is their souls that are communicating. So, to know yourself is to know your soul; and to take care of yourself, is to take care of your soul.
And how can you know yourself? How can you know your soul? Here, Socrates uses the analogy of a mirror. You can see yourself through your reflection in a mirror. Now, one place in which we can see our reflection is in the pupil of the eye of another person. The pupil is the most excellent component of the eye, through which vision is possible. It is through your pupil, through the most beautiful, most excellent and profound window into yourself, that I see my reflection.
Following this analogy, the way to know your soul is to communicate with the most perfect, the most beautiful and most excellent part of another soul. This most perfect part of another person, for Socrates, is that part that is capable of thought and reflection; this is the divine aspect of the soul. Thus, my own true self, the divinity of my own soul, will be reflected and awakened in the mirror of the perfection of your soul.
To “take care of,” in classical Greece, meant to cure, to improve, to make better, to transform. And this involves methods, techniques and practices. So, to take care of your self, means to know how to do certain things, for the purpose of transforming yourself. And, knowing how to do that for yourself, knowing how to handle yourself, you will be able to handle your relationships with others. And then, Alcibiades will have the capacity to be a leader, to bring friendship, justice and concord into the community of people who meet together to decide on the conduct of their affairs.
Foucault, in his study of the Alcibiades, equated these Greek notions and practices of the “care of the self,” with the concept of “spirituality” which he defined as the “search, practice, and experience by which the subject carries out on himself the necessary transformations to have access to the truth” (p. 15). You need to care for yourself, to apply practices of self-transformation, in order to attain to the truth about yourself. And the truth will transform you in turn.
The functions and methods of spirituality
In the Hermeneutics of the Self, Foucault explores a variety of ways in which the care of the self is performed and subjectivity is cultivated, in the works of different authors at different periods in antiquity. While the story of Alcibiades sees the soul turning its gaze to the divine realm through the pupil of the other, authors such as Seneca, Plutarch and Epictetus focus on how to dwell within yourself, on the types of relationships you can have with yourself.
These are sometimes conceived in terms of the juridico-political model: being sovereign over oneself, exercising perfect control over oneself, being fully independent, being completely “self- possessed” (fieri suum, Seneca often says). They are also often represented in terms of the model of possessive enjoyment: self-enjoyment, taking one’s pleasure with oneself, finding all one’s delight in the self. (p. 495)
Foucault identifies three major functions in the methods of the care of the self that he studied:
(1) A critical function: you need to “unlearn” bad habits and false opinions
(2) A function of struggle: the care of the self is an ongoing battle, that is often described with metaphors of the athletic contest (one must train like a wrestler; the struggle is like a wrestling match) or of war (“the soul must be deployed like an army that is always liable to be attacked by an enemy” — p. 495).
(3) A curative and therapeutic function. Medical models and metaphors are frequently used; the role of philosophy is to “cure the diseases of the soul”.
While the care of the self ultimately concerns your relationship with yourself, Foucault shows that this is not a solitary activity. One learns the care of the self in social settings: in philosophical schools, from private counsellors, in family relationships, in relationships with friends, and so on.
Among the spiritual exercises and techniques Foucault discusses are listening skills; the art of reflective writing; taking stock of oneself through recollecting one’s past; meditations on future evils and calamities; exercises of abstinence; privation or physical resistance; keeping watch over one’s thoughts; and meditations on death.
Spirituality, subjectivity and domination
Foucault’s study is titled the “hermeneutics of the subject” because he’s interested in understanding how, through these spiritual techniques, one interprets oneself: how do you interpret what you are thinking or feeling? How do you interpret your role and place in the world? In other words, what meaning do you give to yourself? This reflexive process is the root of subjectivity: how I understand who I am.
The formation of the subject was an overriding concern throughout much of Foucault’s work. Going against transcendental philosophical traditions that posit an eternal and unchanging essence to human subjectivity, Foucault considered that the human subject is an immanent creation — we make ourselves in history. But there are two aspects to the notion of the “subject”: on the one hand, a “subject” is a being with consciousness and agency in relation to the world; on the other hand, the word “subject” also means “to be subject to”, i.e., to be subordinate to, to submit to. A ruler has subjects. Thus, the process of “subjectivation” — acquiring and developing subjectivity, and hence, one’s internal autonomy, is also a process of being subjected to an external power.
Much of Foucault’s earlier work emphasised how modern subjects are formed through processes of subjectivation to regimes of knowledge production. Your identity and subjectivity are shaped by how you are defined, measured and classified in terms of academic performance, health, nationality, ethnicity, civility, and so on — each of which serve to define policies that allocate resources and give you more or less opportunities in life. You perceive yourself in terms of those discourses and you shape your behaviour in response to them. Thus, even when you are “free”, to the extent that you follow those definitions when you reflect on yourself and make your choices in life, you are “subject” to them.
All of these discourses produce knowledge about you, and define who you are. Knowledge about you, then, is a form of power over you. This is why Foucault is very sensitive to the philosophical injunction “know thyself” and how it has been put into practice in Western history. “Know thyself” sounds like simple introspection. But when the practice of Catholic confession arose in medieval Europe, self-knowledge became a process of digging deep into oneself to uncover hidden sins, and telling them to a confessor in order to obtain absolution. The process of self-knowledge became part of your subjection to the priest, in which the priest guided and defined your knowledge of yourself. You never knew enough about yourself; there were always more hidden sins waiting to be uncovered; and the self-knowledge was defined by your uttering it to the confessor. Ultimately, you depended on the priest to guide you to self-knowledge.
With the birth of modern psycho-analysis and other schools of psychology, self-knowledge through confession was secularised, with the psycho-analyst playing the role of the priest, uncovering your inner secrets and defining your inner being. In the modern secular West, confessional self-knowledge thus continues to be a form of power play.
I might even add that, while the psycho-analyst has largely disappeared from our culture, traces of the power dynamic of confessional self-knowledge still exist in various forms of psychotherapy. And the public confession of one’s sins, or the public revelations of one’s intimacy in various types of media, including social media, has become another extension of the confessional culture: the audience now takes the role of the confessor, and the performing subjects, generating and sharing intimate knowledge about themselves, and identifying with the public knowledge about themselves, become subject to the domination of that audience, mediated by a platform whose power is thereby enhanced.
It is in this context that Foucault took a great interest in the “care of the self” that he contrasted with the Dephian injunction to “know thyself”. What he found was a spirituality that did not focus primarily on turning yourself into an object of knowledge, but rather into a relation of caring for yourself. The spiritual discourses and practices he analysed were more practical in orientation. While your relationship with yourself requires you to know yourself, the ultimate purpose of knowing yourself is not to tell others about your inner self, but to live a better life, to handle your relationships better, and to contribute better to the life of society. Thus, Foucault found in these forms of spirituality a way of developing one’s subjectivity that is not subject to regimes of domination through knowledge production.
The Hermeneutics of the Subject and the comparative study of spiritualities
Foucault’s Hermeneutics of the Subject is an important starting point for a systematic, comparative study of forms of spirituality. To begin with, he offers a very precise definition of spirituality, and enumerates a number of key features, which helps to bring clarity to current discourses that are often plagued by vague and wooly conceptions of spirituality. Second, he shows an approach that explores multiple forms of spirituality, each of which is connected to different forms of subjectivity as well as different forms of social relations. It’s an approach that focuses on the minutiae of specific practices as much as on abstract cosmological or philosophical conceptions. Third, it’s sensitive to the subtle relationship between the liberating aspects of spirituality and the dynamics of social power.
As a scholar of Chinese spiritualities who has written about many aspects of their transformations and transnational circulations in modern and contemporary times (see some of my work on general debates, on Qigong, and on Daoism) — in which I sometimes referred to insights from Foucault but was unaware of the Hermeneutics of the Subject — I find many points of potential comparison building on Foucault’s framework, that can both give insights on case from China and elsewhere, and also help to refine Foucault’s definitions and analysis.
In this context, the use of Greek, Roman and early Christian materials to develop a framework on spirituality is also significant, as it shows that “spirituality” isn’t restricted to “spiritual but not religious” New Agers who dabble in Asian and indigenous spiritualities. Spirituality has had many forms within the history of Christianity itself — no surprise here, but definitely worth remembering. More striking, however, is that Foucault shows that the very philosophical foundations of Western civilisation, in the Greek tradition, are, first and foremost, a form of spirituality. This spirituality has had a continuous history running through the hellenistic, Roman and Christian periods, during which the modes of practice and subjectivity have changed, sometimes subtly and sometimes radically.
One of those radical changes was the rise of modern philosophical discourse, which eliminated spirituality from philosophy, and rewrote the narrative of Greek philosophy into a concern with purely abstract intellectual speculation. Thus began the splitting apart of what the Greeks had called the “rational soul.” While a narrowed philosophy took charge of the “rational,” a marginalised spirituality continued with the care of the soul.
What would it mean to bring spirituality back into philosophy?
Click here to read my essay Spirituality as Method in Sociology and Anthropology.
Click here to read my essay Academic Approaches to Spirituality.
[1] Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France, 1981–82. Edited by Frédéric Gros and translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
[2] Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self.” In Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Martin Luther H., Patrick H. Hutton, and Huck Gutman, 16–49. Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1988.2, p. 18.
[3] Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: Vol. 2: Of the History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990, pp. 44–45.
This essay and the New Mindscape Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9014 Spirituality, Religion and Social Change, with the support of the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
