Foucault's Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life

Introduction

The title of this book is a tangle of references. First, it alludes to a line from Foucault’s preface to the book Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Gauttari. Foucault wrote: “Paying a modest tribute to Saint Francis de Sales, one might say that Anti-Oedipus is an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.”1 An Introduction to the Philosophical Life is, then, a slight modification of and reference to this passage, but even more it is intended to invoke all which that passage entails. For Foucault’s words are themselves a referential play on the title of Saint Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life, a seventeenth-century manual of spiritual practice. Further, Foucault’s claim was more than a simple allusion to the title of Saint Francis de Sales’s book; it was a gesture toward the whole tradition of spiritual direction and ascetic practice out of which that book emerged. What’s more, Foucault was heralding the return of this tradition within which the philosophy book served as a “manual or guide to everyday life,” a set of instructions in the “art of living counter to all forms of fascism.”2 I suggest that we take these words as a preface to Foucault’s own project. In other words, I propose that we read Foucault’s work as a sort of manual to the art of living philosophically and as a genealogy of a few of the different forms this art has taken.3 It is in this sense that Foucault’s project could be called An Introduction to the Philosophical Life. However, the expression “philosophical life” might seem a bit odd because we have come to think of philosophy as an academic discipline and not a way of living. What this expression means will become clear as we examine the excavations of ancient philosophy that Foucault carried out in the 1980s. Foucault’s encounter with ancient philosophy allowed him to experience how the practice of philosophy is (or can be), to paraphrase Nietzsche, a way of becoming who one is.4 My claim is that the real effect of Foucault’s research and teaching was not just to develop a theory, to accumulate and transmit knowledge about the history of philosophy. Rather, as his final lectures made so clear, for Foucault philosophical activity was an exercise, an experience. Foucault’s work in this last phase of his life was himself in the act of becoming a philosopher. The purpose of this exercise was to transform himself, to let himself be Introduction xi altered by the activity of thinking, and to offer this experience of selftransformation to those who would come into contact with this work. An Introduction to the Philosophical Life In the opening pages of The Use of Pleasure, Foucault described what he was doing in the following terms: As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient in itself. 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. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself? . . . What is philosophy today—philosophical activity, I mean—if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? . . . The essay—which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes . . . is the living substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is still what it was in times past, i.e., an “ascesis,” askēsis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought.5 This dense and rich text merits our attention and requires unpacking. There are three points in particular that I would like to examine. First of all, Foucault uses the word curiosity to designate his motivation. We can hear the echo of an interview where he says that, to him, the word “evokes ‘concern’; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness...