Michel Foucault on Writing and the Self in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and Confessions of St. Augustine

We have heard it said that the decline of the familiar and traditional in the formerly local societies of Classical Greece gave way to a pan-Hellenistic world wherein customary values and structures were problematized. Major shifts in the cultural and ethical orientations of Greco-Roman society focused upon issues of anxiety and individualism. Here lies the legacy, or perhaps hegemony, of E. R. Dodds’ Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: a culture caught up in “contempt for the human condition and hatred for the body,” a culture in which happiness is no longer bound to the development of culture and society but to the asceticism of the individual. ¹

Certainly as we cut across the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman worlds we notice a surge toward individualism and asceticism. Yet despite the many and current socio-historical analyses that appear to break with the history of ideas and address both discursive and social practices, Foucault is the first to draw our attention to the fact that “there can be no specific moral action that does not refer to a unified moral conduct; no moral conduct that does not call for the forming of oneself as an ethical subject; and no forming of the ethical subject without ‘modes of subjectivation’ and an ‘ascetics’ or ‘practices of the self’ that support them.” ²

In The Care of the Self, Foucault considers the various technologies of the cultivation of the self in the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman worlds where, in addition to the numerous physical and mental regimens designed to take care of the body and mind, “there developed around the care of the self an entire activity of speaking and writing in which the work of oneself on oneself and communication with others were linked together” (Foucault 1986.51). Foucault is, of course, speaking of the practice of meditation (i.e., retreat into oneself through writing) and the practice of spoken and written correspondence (i.e., the giving and receiving of advice from family, friends, and teachers).

The present study will concentrate upon the act of writing as a practical strategy in the constitution of the self. Specifically, it will consider the disparity between the practice of self-cultivation and the practice of self-disclosure represented in the shift from a Stoic to a Christian ethos, or, stated more precisely, from the self-affirming cultivation of oneself in the “writing-retreats” of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations to the self-effacing cultivation of oneself in the writing of the Confessions of St. Augustine.

Writing and Meditation in Marcus Aurelius

The best established title for what we now call the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is simply To Himself (t▪129; eýq ãayt¿n). Though there is much in the work that lends itself to the ethical and philosophical treatise, it is predominantly a collection of concise and memorable sayings recalled and reactivated through the act of writing: they are therapeutic logoi written by oneself for oneself. As Rutherford observes, the Meditations “are not predominately reflections, pensées, or miniature essays; Marcus tends to be talking to and at himself. The aim of the Meditations is therapeutic: to revive and bring home to himself, in suitably striking and memorable form, the moral truths that the author has accepted in the past” (Rutherford 1989.13).

Cicero has a phrase for describing the usefulness of philosophy: it is animi medicina, or “medicine for the soul” (Tusc. 3.1). Marcus also finds the metaphor appropriate for his collection of sayings: “Just as physicians always keep their equipment and instruments ready at hand in case they are suddenly called upon to treat a patient, so do you keep ready your doctrines (d¿gmata) in order to understand things both divine and human and to perform every action” (3.13). ³ “The medicine for this end is words” (l¿goi, d¿gmata): “precepts,” “quotations,” and “exempla” are the instruments of the physician. ⁴ For this task the physician prescribes a retreat; not the retreat customarily taken in “country places, on beaches...