Care of the Self and the Will to Freedom

care of the self

According to Michel Foucault, care of the self first and foremost constitutes creation and governmentation of self. It requires a continuous practice of introspection that simultaneously allows for a realistic sense of one’s own surroundings.

In the Platonic current of thought…the problem for the subject or the individual soul is to turn its gaze upon itself, to recognize itself in what it is and, recognizing itself in what it is, to recall the truths that issue from it and that it has been able to contemplate. (“The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom”, 29)

In order to know ourselves, we must first understand what constitutes caring for ourselves.

It is both a mindset and a practice, constant throughout one’s life, in which the individual takes charge of his own identity and sense of self

For Foucault care of the self is not limited to healthy eating practises. It is a matter of acts and pleasures, not of desire. It is a matter of the formation of the self through techniques of living, not of repression through prohibition and law (“Subjectivity and Truth”, 89).

Rather than identify oneself according to manmade limitations, Foucault suggests that we instead form our own unique individuality by way of our own experience and ethical code

J. Stephen Lansing describes: “The natural order of the cosmos exists independently of human actions, though they may threaten it, whereas the social order forms a whole that exists because of a complete set of exclusively human acts”

For Foucault, power relations exist when all parties involved have certain degrees of both individual freedom and power over the others. When an individual loses his freedom in this power relation, then Foucault calls this a “state of domination.”

Power, Truth and Subjectivity=

Institutions gain power over individuals by way of subjecting them to discourses of truth, and these discourses become truth by way of the institution’s ability to gain enough power to establish a notion of normativity within the larger macrocosm of society.

know yourself and take care of yourself , when Christianity and its ethical canon took hold of the Western world, this mentality shifted. For Foucault, this shift in religious belief also marked a change in focus on individual identity and therefore a change in how individuals related to themselves and others:

There are several reasons why “know yourself” has obscured “take care of yourself.” First, there has been a profound transformation in the moral principles of Western society. We find it difficult to base rigorous morality and austere principles on the precept that we should give more care to ourselves than to anything else in the world. We are more inclined to see taking care of ourselves as an immorality, as a means of escape from all possible rules. We inherit the tradition of Christian morality which makes self-renunciation the condition for salvation. To know oneself was, paradoxically, a means of self-renunciation. (“Technologies of the Self”, 228)