About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980In 1980, Michel Foucault began a vast project of research on the relationship between subjectivity and truth, an examination of conscience, confession, and truth-telling that would become a crucial feature of his life-long work on the relationship between knowledge, power, and the self. The lectures published here offer one of the clearest pathways into this project, contrasting Greco-Roman techniques of the self with those of early Christian monastic culture in order to uncover, in the latter, the historical origin of many of the features that still characterize the modern subject. They are accompanied by a public discussion and debate as well as by an interview with Michael Bess, all of which took place at the University of California, Berkeley, where Foucault delivered an earlier and slightly different version of these lectures. Foucault analyzes the practices of self-examination and confession in Greco-Roman antiquity and in the first centuries of Christianity in order to highlight a radical transformation from the ancient Delphic principle of “know thyself” to the monastic precept of “confess all of your thoughts to your spiritual guide.” His aim in doing so is to retrace the genealogy of the modern subject, which is inextricably tied to the emergence of the “hermeneutics of the self”—the necessity to explore one’s own thoughts and feelings and to confess them to a spiritual director—in early Christianity. According to Foucault, since some features of this Christian hermeneutics of the subject still determine our contemporary “gnoseologic” self, then the genealogy of the modern subject is both an ethical and a political enterprise, aiming to show that the “self” is nothing but the historical correlate of a series of technologies built into our history. Thus, from Foucault’s perspective, our main problem today is not to discover what “the self” is, but to try to analyze and change these technologies in order to change its form. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Subjectivity and Truth 17 November 1980 | 19 |
Christianity and Confession 24 November 1980 | 53 |
Discussion of Truth and Subjectivity 23 October 1980 | 93 |
Interview with Michel Foucault 3 November 1980 | 127 |
| 139 | |
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accept according analysis ancient answer beginning Berkeley body Cassian century Christian Collège de France concerned conduct confession constitution continuously course critical developed direction discourse discover domination English examination exercise existence exomologēsis explains expression fact Fathers force French function genealogy give given Greek hermeneutics HS Eng human idea important individual instance institutions interpretation juridical kind knowledge lectures light manifestation March Marxism master means MFDV michel foucAult monastic movements objective obligation one’s oneself Paris penance permanent philosophy political positive possible practices present principle problem Question reason reference relations relationship role sciences seems self-examination Seneca Serenus sexual sinner sins societies soul speak spiritual structures techniques tell texts theme things thoughts tion tradition trans transformation true truth understand verbalization WDTT Western