|
January 22, 2007
One response to the kind of cultural crisis mentioned here is the Nietzschean idea of self-fashioning in both an ethical and aesthetic sense. This kind of crisis, which involves the the inability of a culture to conceive of its own destruction and possible extinction, raises questions such as: What should a people do in such a situation --when, for a number of historical contingent reasons, a traditional way of life comes to an end? How should one face the possibility that one's culture might collapse? How should we live with this vulnerability? Can we make any sense of facing up to such a challenge with "courage"? What conception of "courage" is required? What would "virtue" or "imaginative excellence" and "courage" entail in such a context? Can we still have hope?
As is well known, Nietzsche's response to the cultural crisis provoked by the death of God, was an active nihilism:--- a possibility of self-overcoming, encapsulated in Nietzsche’s different notions of the “free spirit,” the “philosopher of the future,” the “higher men,” and the Ubermensch. This was a process of “becoming-Ubermensch a process of self-overcoming and the transvaluation of values. And for Foucault, the death of the humanist subject, that heir to the Christian subject, also created the possibility of an ethics of self-fashioning, entailing both an aesthetics of existence and a vision of asceticism rooted in the Greco-Roman world, and pointing to an overcoming of the crisis brought on by the death of man. Both Nietzsche and Foucault understood philosophy as an art of living.
This is explored in an article entitled The Aesthetic and Ascetic Dimensions of an Ethics of Self-Fashioning in Nietzsche and Foucault by Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg in the latest issue of Parrhesia. I'll concentrate on their interpretation fo Foucault as they argue that he builds upon builds upon what Nietzsche had bequeathed to him. Nietzsche had called for making one’s life into a work of art, the broad outlines of which he had delineated.
Milchman and Alan Rosenberg say that Foucault's understanding of philosophy as an art of living is dominated by the principle that says one must ‘take care of oneself ’.
It is this idea of care of self ...and the idea that one could take one’s own life or body, as the “material” for a work of art that is the hallmark of Foucault’s refunctioning of aesthetics. Several conceptual breakthroughs follow from this move. First, there is the establishment of an intimate link between
the aesthetic and the ethical domains, between an art of existence and care of self, the latter being
central to Foucault’s ethics of self-fashioning...Second, there is Foucault’s translation of art as technê, which also links it to the Greek concept of poiêsis, to the work of an artisan, and to the word “technique.” ...Third,even when Foucault did link the aesthetic to the beautiful, it was in the Greek, not the modern sense, that he used this term. Thus, for Foucault, the beautiful, kalos, had – as it did for the Greeks – the sense of “fine” or “good,” as when we still speak today of one’s “inward beauty” or “beautiful soul,” and mean it in an ethical sense
The ethics of self-fashioning involves a practical training that was indispensable in order for an individual to form themselves as a moral subject.
|
