IV

    I have spoken of three Stoic techniques of the self: letters to friends and disclosure of self; examination of self and conscience, including a review of what was done, of what should have been done, and comparison of the two. Now I want to consider the third Stoic technique, askesis, not a disclosure of the secret self but a remembering.

For Plato, one must discover the truth that is within oneself. For the Stoics, truth is not in oneself but in the logoi, the teaching of the teachers. One memorises what one has heard, converting the statements one hears into rules of conduct. The subjectivation of truth is the aim of these techniques. During the imperial period , one couldn't assimilate ethical principles without a theoretical framework such as science, as for example in Lucretius's De Rerum Naturae. There are structural questions underlying the praxis of the examination of the self every night. I want to underscore the fact that in Stoicism it's not the deciphering of the self, not the means to disclose secrecy, which is important; it's the memory of what you've done and what you've had to do.

In Christianity, asceticism always refers to a certain renunciation of the self and of reality because most of the time your self is a part of that reality you have to renounce in order to get access to another level of reality. This move to attain the renunciation of the self distinguishes Christian asceticism.

In the philosophical tradition dominated by stoicism, askesis means not renunciation but the progressive self-consideration, or mastery over oneself, obtained not through the renunciation of reality but through the acquisition and assimilation of truth. It has as its final aim not preparation for another reality but access to the reality of this world. The Greek word for this is paraskeuazõ (to get prepared). It is a set of praxes by which one can acquire, assimilate, and transform truth into a permanent principle of action. Alethia becomes ethos. It is a process of becoming more subjective.

What are the principal features of askesis? They include exercises in which the subject puts himself into a situation in which he can verify whether he can confront events and use the discourse with which he is armed. It is a question of testing the preparation. Is this truth assimilated enough to become ethics so that we can behave as we must when an event presents itself?

The Greeks characterised the two poles of those exercises by the terms melete and gymnasia.

Melete means meditation, according to the Latin translation, meditatio. It has the same root as epimelesthai. It is a rather vague term, a technical term borrowed from rhetoric. Melete is the work one undertook in order to prepare a discourse or an improvisation by thinking over useful terms and arguments. You had to anticipate the real situation through dialogue in your thoughts. The philosophical meditation is this kind of meditation: It is composed of memorising responses and reactivating those memories by placing oneself in a situation where one can imagine how one would react. One judges the reasoning one should use in an imaginary exercise in order to test an action or event, for example, how would I react? Imagining the articulation of possible events to test how you would react — i.e. meditation.

The most famous exercise of meditation is the premeditatio mallorum as practiced by the Stoics. It is an ethical, imaginary experience. In appearance it's a rather dark and pessimistic vision about eidetic reduction.

First, it is not a question of imagining the future as it is likely to turn out but to imagine the worst which can happen, even if there's little chance that it will turn out that way — the worst as certainty, as actualising what could happen, not as calculation of probability.

Second, one shouldn't envisage things as possibly taking place in the distant future but as already actual and in the process of taking place. For example, imagining not that one might be exiled but rather that one is already exiled, subjected to torture, and dying.

Third, one does this not in order to experience inarticulate sufferings but in order to convince oneself that they are not real ills. The reduction of all that is possible, of all the duration and of all the misfortunes, reveals not something bad but what we have to accept. It consists of having at the same time the future and the present event. The Epicureans were hostile to it because they thought it was useless. They thought it better to recollect and memorise past pleasures in order to derive pleasure from present events.

At the opposite pole is gymnasia meaning to train oneself. While meditatio is an imaginary experience that trains thought, gymnasia is training in a real situation, even if it's been artificially induced. There is a long tradition behind this: sexual abstinence, physical privation, and other rituals of purification.

Those praxes of abstinence have other meanings than purification or witnessing radical force, as in Pythagoras and Socrates. In the culture of the Stoics, their function is to establish and test the autonomy of the individual with regard to the external world. For example, in Plutarch's De Genio Socratis, one gives oneself over to very hard sporting activities. Or one temps oneself by placing oneself in front of many tantalising dishes and then renouncing these appetising dishes. Then you call your slaves and give them the dishes, and you take the meal prepared for the slaves. Another example is Seneca's eighteenth letter to Lucilius. He prepares for a great feast day by acts of mortification of the flesh in order to convince himself that poverty is not an obstacle, and that he can endure it.

Between these poles of training in thought and training in reality, melete and gymnasia, there are a whole series of intermediate possibilities. Epictetus provides the best example of the middle ground between these poles. He wants to watch perpetually over representations, a technique which culminates in Freud. There are two metaphors important from his point of view: the snetinel, who doesn't admit anyone into town if that person can't prove who he is (we must be sentinels over the flux of thought), and the money changer, who verifies the authenticity of currency, looks at it, weighs and verifies it. We have to be money changers of our representations of our thoughts, vigilantly testing them, verifying them.

The same metaphor of the money changer is found in the Stoics and in early Christian literature but with different meanings. When Epictetus says you have to be a money changer, he means as soon as an idea comes to mind you have to think of the rules you must apply to evaluate. For John Cassian, being a money changer and looking at your thoughts means something very different: It means you must try to decipher it, at the root of the movement which brings you the representations, there is or is not concupiscence or desire — if your innocent thought has evil origins; if you have something underlying which is the great seducer, which is perhaps hidden, the money of your thought.

In Epictetus there are two exercises: sophistic and ethical. The first are exercises borrowed from school: truth-or-dare games. This must be an ethical game; that is, it must teach a moral lesson. The second are more ambulatory exercises. In the morning you go for a walk, and you test your reactions to that walk. The purpose of both exercises is control of representations, not the deciphering of truth. They are reminders about conforming to the rules in the face of adversity. A pre-freudian machine of censorship is described word for word in the tests of Epictetus and Cassian. For Epictetus, the control of representations means not deciphering but recalling principles of acting and thus seeing, through introspection, if they govern your life; i.e. permanent self-examination: you have to be your own censor. The meditation on death is the culmination of all these exercises.

In addition to letters, examination, and askesis, we must now evoke a fourth technique in the examination of the self, the interpretation of dreams. It was to have an important destiny in the nineteenth century, but it occupied a relatively marginal position in the ancient world. Philosophers had an ambivalent attitude toward the interpretation of dreams. Most Stoics are critical and skeptical about such interpretation. But there is still the popular and general praxis of it. There were experts who were able to interpret dreams, including Pythagoras and some of the Stoics, and some experts who wrote books to teach people to interpret their own dreams. There were huge amounts of literature on how to do it, but the only surviving manual The Interpretation of Dreams by Artemidorus (second century AD). Dream interpretation was important because in antiquity the meaning of a dream was always understood as the revelation of a future event.

I should mention two other documents dealing with the importance of dream interpretation for everyday life. The first is by Synesius of Cyrene in the fourth century AD. He was well known and cultivated. Even though he was not a Christian, he asked to be a bishop. His remarks on dreams are interesting, for public divination was forbidden in order to spare the emperor bad news. Therefore, one had to interpret one's own dreams; one had to be a self-interpreter. To do it, one had to remember not only one's dreams but the events before and after. One had to record what happened every day, both the life of the day and the life of the night.

Aelius Aristides' Sacred Discourses, written also in the second century AD, records his dreams and explains how to interpret them. He believed that in the interpretation of dreams we receive advice from the gods about remedies for illness. With this exercise, we are at the crossing point of two kinds of discourses. It isn't the writing of daily activities that is the matrix of the Sacred Discourses but the ritual inscription of praises to the gods that have healed you.

TECHNOLOGIES of the SELF
A Seminar with Michel Foucault