The Hermeneutics of Reading Foucault

“Maybe our problem is now to discover that the self is nothing else than the historical correlation of the technology built in our history.” — Michel Foucault (Hermeneutics 222-223)

In the essay “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” Foucault separates the pagan and Christian notions/beliefs (thoughts) and practices (actions). For Foucault, the pagan/Roman/Hellenistic notion of “truth” is distinct from the Christian notion of “God”; the pagan rituals of self-care differ from Christian self-knowledge1; and the pagan self-as-entity-to-be-(re)created versus the Christian self-as-text-to-be-read casts pagans in a future-focused, and Christians in a past-focused, light. This separation forms a useful framework to use as a starting point; he has pulled apart our cultural roots at the point of our common ancestry, so that we might examine them. However, it is now necessary to put them back together2 to see our modern, Western reality as the unified whole, complete, and living organism3 that it is. The pagan and the Christian “technologies of the self” are not as divorced as Foucault makes them seem; rather, they are necessarily intertwined in complex ways and have weaved in different patterns at various historical points.

Foucault states: “In the Christian confession the penitent has to memorize the law in order to discover his own sins4, but in this Stoic exercise the sage has to memorize acts in order to reactivate the fundamental rule” (Hermeneutics 207). Christian confession emphasizes self-knowledge, versus the Stoic exercise’s emphasis on “memories which must be brought into the present and acts which have to be regulated” (Hermeneutics 207). For Foucault, “the self in all those (pagan) exercises is not considered as a field of subjective data which have to be interpreted. It submits itself to the trial of possible or real action” (Hermeneutics 208). However, I argue that not only have Christian and pagan practices of self-knowledge and self-care integrated to form our culture today, but it is also true that early Christianity–in order to court believers/followers in Christ–adopted and accommodated many pagan (1) thoughts/beliefs (self-knowledge, Gnosis) and (2) practices/customs/character (taking care of oneself) including but not limited to: multiple gods (now called angels and demons), festivals (Christmas and Easter), practices (not having to circumcise), and so on–at least until the Council of Nicea and the establishment of the Nicene Creed (the correct, aka orthodox, aka not-Gnostic) beliefs (Ehrdman). While it is true that Christianity, more than any other religion including Roman/Hellenistic paganism, focuses more so on correct beliefs than on correct practices (Ehrdman)–namely, the cleansing rituals and animal sacrifices of Judaism and paganism from whence it sprang–it is also true that these beliefs have included an emphasis on acts, as well (i.e., Jesus’ statement in Matthew 7:15 NKJV, “you will know them by their fruits”). Further complicating Foucault’s separation of self-care and self-knowledge in his attempt to argue that self-knowledge reigns our culture (with which I do not argue), is the internal debate within Christianity5 between being “saved by faith” or “works.”6 Self-knowledge and self-care merge in the Jesuit practice of the “daily examen” which incorporates similar techniques/technologies of the self in which the Roman stoics participated, which Foucault cites as evidence to distance the pagan from the Christian practice of self-knowledge/care. To state that Christianity as a whole is concerned only with “knowledge” is not the true, full picture. “Knowledge” and “works” work together to form a complex ideology and way of being/living that we must sort through today.

Notes

1 “In the Hellenistic or Roman philosophy, you see that the self is not something that has to be discovered or deciphered as a very obscure text. You see that the task is not to put in the light what would be the most obscure part of our selves. The self has, on the contrary, not to be discovered but to be constituted, to be constituted through the force of truth. … In the Christian technologies of the self, the problem is to discover what is hidden inside the self; the self is like a text or like a book that we have to decipher, and not something which has to be constructed by the superposition, the superimposition, of the will and the truth. This organization, this Christian organization, so different from the pagan one, is something which is I think quite decisive for the genealogy of the modern self” (Hermeneutics 210).

2 In the spirit of modern, Jungian psychotherapy of reintegration of the self as well as in the Derridian spirit of deconstruction.

3 As Christian mystic and early-nineteenth century poet/artist William Blake would say, we need to examine the world in its minute particulars to conceive of it as a whole–as it truly is–rather than as a (man-made) abstraction.

4 “Thought, says Cassian, thought is like a millstone which grinds the grains. The grains are of course the ideas which present continuously themselves in the mind. And in the comparison of the millstone, it is up to the miller to sort out amongst the grains those which are bad and those which can be admitted to the millstone because they are good. The grains are of course the ideas which present continuously themselves in the mind.” (Hermeneutics 217). “What is their origin? … even if they are of good quality and origin, have they not been whittled away and rusted by evil sentiments?”

“Since under the reign of Satan the human being was attached to himself, verbalization as a movement toward God is a renunciation to Satan, and a renunciation to oneself. Verbalization is a self-sacrifice” (220). What is the self then, that is being sacrificed? It is the false self, the egoic self that is self-constructed, self-fashioned, in favor of the “true,” pure, unsullied, God-given self.

5 The Protestant Reformation itself can be seen as a macro-level attempt to divorce Western beliefs and practices from Catholicism, purportedly tainted by pagan adaptations and accommodations over the 1,600+ years since Christ’s death. The micro-version of the Reformation would be the removal of the “self”–the egoic self, which has been created/crafted by the individual–with the help of Satan–versus the pure, original “soul” created by God. It would also result in a new canonical Bible–the “right” way of believing in scripture.

6 Is the soul saved by the work–sacrifice–already performed by Jesus? This would be the protestant view. Or, is it saved by the work–self-sacrifice–practiced by the individual? This would be the Catholic point of view.

Works Cited

Ehrdman, Bart D. The Triumph of Christianity. Simon & Schuster, 2018.

Foucault, Michel. “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self.” Political Theory, vol. 21, no. 2, 1993, pp. 198-227.

—. “Technologies of the Self.” Technologies of the Self, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, pp. 16-49.

—. “Truth, Power, and Self.” Technologies of the Self, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, pp. 9-15.

Matto, Michael. “True Confessions: ‘The Seafarer’ and Technologies of the ‘Sylf.’” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 103, no. 2, 2004, pp. 156-179.