I'm not really that well versed on Foucault's thought, although I have read several of his writings. I'll confess that whenever I read him something always seems wrong. Further his historical "evidences" often are criticized by historians. (i.e. the critique that he plays fast and loose with history) Still I confess that many of his insights are quite interesting. Over at Philosophical Conversations and Foucauldian Reflections there are discussions regarding Foucault's search for Kantian autonomy. The basic idea is that our search for autonomy is the attempt to transcend the rules that constitute us right now and giving ourselves the rules, styles and conventions that we've made.
It is an interesting question and ends up getting into the whole free will debate from a very different point of view. (IMO) I confess I found it quite relevant given that the next chapter of Blake's book I deal with gets at this issue of autonomy, volition and freedom.
Foucault apparently sees the issue of what there is of value in Greek ethics even as Greek ethics is dead. The Greeks had this idea that ethics was grounded in aesthetics or art. The good and the beautiful were inherently related. Yet the modern era, according to Foucault, rejects grounding ethics in God. I think there is something to be said for that. A lot of the history of ethics in modern philosophy is to see how to consider ethics without requiring an appeal to God. Yet the implication of this seems to be a kind of appeal to the good as what man wants. Even utilitarianism, for instance, grounds the good in terms of what makes man happy - often independent of the question of why something makes us happy. There is always this sense of the old humanist creed of the Renaissance: man is the measure of all things.
Yet, if man is the measure, what does that say if man is also free in a unique sense? (An other gift of the Renaissance that takes us to the heart of the free will issue) Ethics seems ungrounded. Yet, and this is where Foucault seems to take the issue, there is the issue of style. (I sense that here Foucault is being very Nietzschean) How do we give life style? Thus ethics becomes a question of style. One can't help but wonder if this doesn't take us back to the old issue of rhetoric - especially as found in the Renaissance. Speaking well as a way to consider the self.
If this is so (and by now I've long left considering Foucault) then self-fashioning as both aesthetics and ethics ends up being tied to the community. After all the first rule of rhetoric is to know ones audience. Thus one would suspect that ethics is tied to the crowd. Something I'm not sure Nietzsche would countenance. I can't speak to Foucault, but my sense is that his notion of autonomy is the attempt to be independent from the masses. Perhaps this attempt to be truly independent is impossible. Independence and identity is always fashioning from within the community a place for oneself in terms of the community.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
and Theology
Number of unique visitors:
Blogged by Clark Goble