Ali Rizvi over at the very informative Foucauldian Reflections has a good post on Foucault's aesthetic of existence. This has connections to Bataille and Nietzsche's close attention to self (subjectivity), and their Stoic conception of the joyous acceptance of the present moment imposed on us by historical fate.

This kind of philosophy is quite different from the university based modern philsophy, which is specialized, professional, and detached from life. Bataille and Nietzsche practiced their craft. They did not merely study it as many academic philosophers do today. Bataille and Nietzsche and considered philosophy a means of transformation of the subjectivity rather than a purely theoretical endeavor.

Ali understands Foucault's care of self as a:

"...self-fashioning without reference to any rules and predetermined patterns is what amounts to making our lives a work of art and giving style to one’s existence."

My concern here is not with Foucault's historical interpretations of the classical Greek and Roman texts. I am in no position to make judgements on this culture of the self in terms of scholarship. What I am interested in is the reshaping of the classial conception of philosophy as way of life so that it is of use to us in postmodernity.

On my understanding this is what Foucault has achieved with his genealogy of modes of subjectivation. So what does Foucault's aesthetics of existence as a self-fashioning mean?

Ali's interpretation is that:

"Foucault’s real interest is not in reviving Greek ethics but to see how it can help to continue essentially a Kantian project; and he thinks that the Greek idea of ethics as a work of art and giving style to one’s existence can help articulate an ethics which can not possibly be based on the knowledge of essences or on divine or natural law (due to Kant’s insights).... if the West does not believe anymore in natural law, if the West has discovered that practical reason or moral reason does not provide any preestablished norms and if the West still believes in the project of autonomy then what else can it do but to take the ethical enterprise as a work of art?"

Ali ends with a rhetorical question: If we accept the philosophical ethos of modernity(autonomy), then what else can we in the West do but take the ethical enterprise as a work of art? The answer is that there are alternatives to Foucault'reworking; different ways of re- working the classical conception of philosophy as a way of life that involves a working on oneself to remove those ideas, beliefs, values that make us sick.

Bataille for instance was not making himself into a work of art with a particular style. Neither was Nietzsche. Nor were either of them reviving Greek ethics per se. But they were working within a classical philosophical tradition, reshaping it and making it modern. That tradition, with its different schools (Stoicism, Epicureanism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Cynicism and Pyrrhorism) involves a consensus conception of philosophy as a way of life with its grouping of categories; but within that there are different modes of reasoning; diverse literary genres, rhetorical rules and styles; different ways of dealing with what makes us sick; different ways of building on the pre-frabricated and pre-existing elements to construct new meanings.

This re-working is what Foucault is doing. But his is not the only way of doing it, as the texts of Bataille and Nietzsche attest. For the moment let us naively state the differences in terms of a style of life and a way of life.

Should we not, in the spirit of Foucault, be generating differences rather than formng a new unitary community?