When I began to study the rules, obligations and prohibitions with which sexuality is charged, I did not simply deal with the permitted or prohibited actions, but with the feelings, thoughts and desires that may be experienced, with the urge to search within oneself for hidden sensations, for the soul's impulse, for desires that might be hidden under deceptive masks. There is an essential difference between prohibitions concerning sex and those concerning other things. Unlike other prohibitions, sexual prohibitions are regularly connected with the obligation to tell the truth about oneself.

Two facts could be put forward against this view: firstly, the fact that great importance is attached by criminal and religious institutions to the confession of all offences, and not only sexual misconduct. But the duty to analyse one's own desires always carries more importance in the field of sexuality than in all other offences.

I am also well aware of the second objection. According to it, sexual behaviour was subject, more than any other, to extremely strict rules of secrecy, decency and restraint, so that sexuality is, in a strange and complex way, simultaneously occupied by a linguistic prohibition and the obligation to tell the truth, in other words, by the demand to hide what one does, and to decipher who one is.

Linking the prohibition to the sustained demand to speak is a constant feature of our culture. In the confession that the monk had to make to his abbot, the subject of turning away from the flesh was connected with the obligation to report to the abbot everything that was going on in the monk's mind.

I now came up with the idea of embarking on a rather strange project, which was not to trace the development of sexual behaviour, but to uncover the history of this link, the link between the obligation to tell the truth and the prohibitions that weighed on sexuality. I asked: in what way was the subject forced to decipher himself in relation to what was forbidden? This question aims at the relationship between asceticism and truth.

Max Weber asked: If you want to behave rationally and orient your own actions towards principles of truth, which part of the self do you have to renounce? What is the ascetic price of reason? What kind of asceticism should one turn to? I have asked the opposite question: How have certain kinds of interdictions required the price of certain kinds of knowledge about oneself? What must one know about oneself in order to be willing to renounce anything?

Thus I arrived at the hermeneutics of the techniques of the self in pagan and early Christian praxes. In my research I encountered numerous difficulties, because these praxes are little known. First, Christianity has always been more interested in the history of its beliefs than in the history of real practices. Secondly, such hermeneutics have never been condensed into a dogmatic approach, as is the case with textual hermeneutics. Third, the hermeneutics of the self has been mixed up with the theologies of the soul — lust, sin, apostasy from faith. Fourthly, this hermeneutics has spread through numerous channels throughout culture and has made connections with many different attitudes and experiences, so that it is difficult to separate them from our own spontaneous experiences.

Context of the Investigation

My objective for more than twenty-five years has been to sketch out a history of the different ways in our culture that humans develop knowledge about themselves: economics, biology, psychiatry, medicine, and penology. The main point is not to accept this knowledge at face value but to analyse these so-called sciences as very specific truth games related to specific techniques that human beings use to understand themselves.

The context for this is formed by four types of such technologies, each of which forms a matrix of functional reason:

• Technologies of production, which allow us to produce, change or otherwise manipulate things.


• Technologies of sign-systems that allow us to deal with signs, meanings, symbols or sense.


• Technologies of power, which shape the behaviour of individuals and subject them to certain purposes or a rule that makes the subject an object.


• Technologies of the self, which allow individuals, by their own power or with the help of others, to perform a series of operations from their body or soul, thinking, behaviour and mode of existence, with the aim of changing themselves to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality.

These four types of technologies hardly ever function separately, although each one of them is associated with a certain I type of domination. Each implies certain modes of training and modification of individuals, not only in the obvious sense of acquiring certain skills but also in the sense of acquiring certain attitudes. I wanted to show both their specific nature and their constant interaction. For instance, one sees the relation between manipulating things and domination in Marx's Das Kapital, where every technique of production requires modification of individual conduct not only skills but also attitudes.

Usually the first two technologies are dealt with in the study of science and language systems. My main focus, however, was on the technologies of power and the self. So I did not investigate madness according to formal scientific criteria, but to show how this strange discourse has created a certain way of dealing with individuals inside and outside the asylum. I name this connection between technologies mind-control.

Perhaps I've insisted too much in the technology of domination and power. I am more and more interested in the interaction between oneself and others and in the technologies of individual domination, the history of how an individual acts upon himself, in the technology of self.

Development of Autonomy Techniques

I would like to briefly outline the development of the hermeneutics of the self in two different contexts, between which, however, exists a historical connection: 1. in the Greco-Roman philosophy of the first and second centuries of the early Roman Empire, and 2. in Christian spirituality and the rules of monastic life as they were developed in the fourth and fifth centuries in the late Roman Empire. The reflections are not only intended to move within the theoretical field, but also to include practices that were peculiar to late antiquity. These practices were described in Greek as epimelesthai sautou, which means to care for oneself, to worry about oneself, to fend for oneself.

The requirement to care for oneself was considered by the Greeks to be one of the central principles of the polis, the main rule for social and personal behaviour and for the art of living. For us today this term is obscure and faded. If we are asked which is the most important moral principle of ancient philosophy, we will not say: care for yourself; rather we will refer to the famous know thyself of the Delphic Oracle.

Perhaps our philosophical tradition has overestimated the Know thyself and forgotten the Care for yourself. The Delphic maxim was nevertheless, not an abstract principle of lifestyle, but a practical instruction. Know thyself, which actually meant do not suppose yourself to be a god. Other comments gave it the meaning: be careful of what you actually ask when you consult the Oracle.

In Greek and Roman texts the commandment to recognise oneself was always linked to the maxim of taking care of oneself, and it was this requirement to take care of oneself that brought the Delphic maxim into effect. It is inherent in the entire Greek and Roman culture, implicitly from time immemorial and explicitly since Plato's Alcibiades I. In the Socratic Dialogues, in Xenophon, Hippocrates and in the New Platonic tradition from Albinus onwards, one had to engage with oneself before the Delphic maxim could be effective at all. The know thyself was subordinated to the care for oneself. I would like to give a few examples of this:

In Plato's Apology 29e, of Socrates, Socrates presents himself to his judges as the master of epimelesthai sautou. He asks: […] you are not ashamed to provide for money […] and for fame and honour, but you do not provide for yourself, that is, for insight […] and truth and your soul that it is at its best. He, instead, goes around and persuades his fellow citizens to take care for themselves, for their souls.

Socrates makes three important remarks in connection with his request to others to take care of their souls:

1. he has received the commission to do so from the gods, and he will not let go of it, even if it costs him his life.

2. He does not demand any reward for his efforts; he does not pursue material interests; he acts solely out of love for his neighbour.

3. his mission is of benefit to the city — of greater benefit than the military victory of the Athenians at Olympia — because by teaching people to take care of themselves, he teaches them to take care of the city.

Eight hundred years later, the same term and sentence is found in the treatise De virginitate by Gregory of Nyssa, but with a completely different meaning. Gregory did not mean concern for himself and the city; he meant renouncing the world, renouncing marriage and turning away from the flesh in order to regain, virgin in body and soul, the immortality he had lost. In a commentary on the parable of the lost drachma (Luke 15.8-10), Gregory exhorts the reader to light a candle, to search the house until one sees the drachma shimmering. In order to regain the power that God has given to the soul and that has been eclipsed by the body, one must take care of oneself and illuminate every corner of one's soul (De virginitate 12).

We can see that Christian ascesis, like ancient philosophy, placed itself under the sign of concern for itself. The obligation to know oneself is one of the essential elements of its thinking and doing. Between these two extremes — Socrates and Gregory of Nyssa — the concern for oneself not only marks a maxim, it is at the same time a continuous praxis.

I will give two more examples. The first Epicurean text that served as a manual of morality was the Letter to Menoikeus (Diogenes Laërtius 10.122-138). Epicurus writes that it is never too early and never too late to concern oneself with one's soul. One should philosophise when one is young and when one is old. This is a task to which one must devote his whole life. The teachings of the daily life were organised around the care for oneself and should help each person in a group to find salvation together.

Another example is found in an Alexandrian text, the treatise De Vita contemplativa of Thilo of Alexandria. It tells of an obscure, cryptic group on the fringes of Hellenic culture, called therapists, who were characterised by their devotion. It was a strict, dedicated and austere community; it was devoted to reading, healing meditation, individual and community prayer. These praxes resulted from the central task of self-care (De Vita contemplativa 36).

Thus we have the starting point for a possible analysis of the concern for oneself in the culture of antiquity. I would like to look into the relationship between care and consciousness, the relationship that exists in the Greco-Roman and Christian traditions between care for oneself and the all-too-familiar maxim know thyself. Because, just as there are different forms of caring, there are also different forms of self.

Abstract

There are several reasons why the know thyself has pushed the maxim care for yourself into the background. First of all, a profound change has taken place in the moral concepts of western societies. It is difficult for us to base rigorous morals and strict principles on the commandment to pay more attention to ourselves than anything else in the world. We are predisposed, in the fear for ourselves, to suspect something immoral, a means of relieving ourselves from all conceivable rules.

We are heirs to the Christian moral tradition that came in selflessness. But we are also heirs to a secular tradition that accepts external law as the basis of morality. Under these circumstances, how can respect for the self be the basis of morality for both? We are the heirs of a social ethics that seeks the rules for acceptable behaviour in relationships with others. Since the sixteenth century, criticism of morality has been made with reference to the importance of self-esteem and consciousness. It is therefore difficult to see that concern for oneself is compatible with morality. The know thyself has eclipsed the respect for yourself; our morality, an ascetic kind of morality, assumes that one can deny the self. A second reason lies in the fact that consciousness (the thinking subject) has gained increasing importance in philosophy from Descartes to Husserl as the first step towards epistemology.

Altogether we can say: There has been a shift in the priority of the two ancient maxims care for yourself and know yourself. In Greco-Roman culture, consciousness appears as the consequence of taking care of oneself. In modernity, however, consciousness embodies a fundamental axiom.

TECHNOLOGIES of the SELF
A Seminar with Michel Foucault