Hermeneutics of the self 1980. In Religion & Culture Ed. Jeremy Carrette (1999).

These are the so–called “Dartmouth lectures.” Similar to the Howison Berkeley lectures, also related to “Sexuality and Solitude” in Essential F. I, pp. 175–184.

Concerning technologies of the self in Greek and Christian times.

Starts with the story of the doctor Leuret who showers his patient to get him to confess he is mad (cf. Sex. & Solitude, p. 175). He notes that this confession has for a long time been considered “either as a condition for redemption for one’s sins or as an essential item in the condemnation of the guilty” p. 159. In general it is a postulate of Western society that a man needs to know who he is, and he needs to tell it. Face the truth about yourself, before you can deal with your problems and get better.

Gives his potted history of philosophy’s concern with the subject and how it changed after the war. A “philosophy of knowledge” having failed two ways out appeared; namely objective knowledge (positivism) and an analysis of systems of meaning (semiology, structuralism).

He has tried a third way, to do a history of the subject, a geneaology. p. 160.

In terms of method, you would want to pay attention to the history of science as knowledge in the west has tended to form around this. There’s an archaeology and geneaology going on: arch because wants to unearth the discursive, institutional and social practices from which knowledges arose; and genealogy because wants to see where and how these discourses became linked with the truth. there’s also the need to study the technologies of the self (“certain techniques and certain kinds of discourse about the subject”). p. 161.

“Which techniques and practices form the Western concept of the subject?” p. 161. He thinks this might have a “political” dimension, ie what we are prepared to put up with, and through which we might seek the “indefinite possibilities of trnasforming the subject, of transforming ourselves” p. 161. This is part of a tension in that we find power penetrating everywhere but in his later work he emphasises these techniques of self-transformation.

So now is concerned with how people come to have a self-understanding, esp. in the experience of sexuality. How people transform themselves which he calls techniques of the self, and of how these interact with techniques of “domination” (power...) p. 162. this all can be called governmentality.

Will sketch out one transformation historically, ie that of the change from “know yourself” in Greece to “confess to an authority” in Christianity.

In Greek philosophy the idea was to transform the individual. What place did self-examination have in this? It was certainly constrained by two things:

1.  phil. training was to provide precepts to live by, to be tranquil in oneself, and to be master of oneself. This devp. in the relation of a pupil and a master. This is the “master’s discourse” p. 163.

2.  This relationship was not one where the student had to reveal everything all the time to the master. you actively solicited the help of the master to help you out, and to provide advice. You have some autonomy. [Cf. the depictions in Last of the Wine and Alexias and Lysis, or other characters and Socrates.]

But F. does a communal life, and see the growing importance of tech. to self-examine: perhaps due to living more in due to the medical model p. 164.

[This practice of self–examination and critical recollection was “a standard spiritual practice” by Seneca’s time (Cooper & Procope, p. 110). Cf. Epictetus, IV 4.46 (“if you see any of the things that you have learned and studied thoroughly coming to fruition for you in action, rejoice in these things. If you have put away or reduced a malignant disposition, and reviling, or impertinence, or foul language, or recklessness, or negligence; if you are not moved by the thins that once moved you, or at least not to the same degree, then you can keep festival day after day; today because you have behaved well in this action, tomorrow because you behaved well in another”), Horace Satire I 4.133–8. They note that it appears to have originated with the Pythagorean school where it was as much a mnemonic as a moral exercise. Cf. Genealogy where F. discusses the hupomnemata of the Phaedrus.]