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The University of Chicago the Ethical Views of Michel THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO THE ETHICAL VIEWS OF MICHEL FOUCAULT A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY BY DANIEL R. RODRÍGUEZ-NAVAS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2016 Copyright c 2016 by Daniel R. Rodríguez-Navas All Rights Reserved To my mother Rosa Matilde Navas Pietri, and to my father Ricardo Mario Rodríguez Jimenez Human being has this choice, this unique choice: either nothing- ness or a God. Choosing nothingness, he turns himself into a God, and turns God in to a ghost, for it is impossible, if there is no God, that human being and everything surrounding human being be nothing but a ghost. I repeat: God is and he is outside of me, a living being, existing by and for itself, or else me, I am a God. There is no other possibility. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi An anti-metaphysical view of the world—yes, but an artistic one. Friedrich Nietzsche The story goes that, before or after he died, he found himself before God and he said: “I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man: myself.” The voice of God replied from a whirlwind: “Neither am I one self; I dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are many persons—and none.” Jorge Luis Borges Such was a poet and shall be and is— who’ll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam’s architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain’s heartbeat in his hand. E.E. Cummings TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . vii ABSTRACT ........................................ x IINTRODUCTION 1 ETHICS: THE WILL TO TRUTH AND THE AESTHETICS OF EXISTENCE . 2 1.1 Interpretive Goals . 6 1.2 The Structure of the Dissertation: Synoptic Overview . 9 1.3 The Structure of the Dissertation: Extended Overview of Parts II to V . 10 II NIETZSCHEAN ORIGINS THESTANDARDSTORY ................................ 22 2 THE SHIFT IN FOUCAULT’S ATTITUDE TOWARD PSYCHOLOGY IN THE EARLY1950S...................................... 29 2.1 Existential Analysis and the Critique of Naturalistic Psychology . 30 2.2 From Existential Analysis Toward the Historical Critique of Psychology . 47 2.3 The Shift in Foucault’s Attitude Towards Psychology in 1953 . 58 3 THE HISTORICITY OF TRUTH AND FORMS OF RATIONALITY . 61 3.1 An Ethical Imperative to Break with Tradition . 66 3.2 Three Anchoring Points of Tradition: Truth, History, Subjectivity . 71 3.3 TheNietzscheanInfluence:(I)Truth . 85 3.4 TheNietzscheanInfluence: (II)History . 98 3.5 Appendix: Jaspers’ Influence on Foucault’s Reading of Nietzsche . 118 4 THE HISTORICITY OF HUMAN BEING: SUBJECTIVATION . 122 4.1 TheNietzscheanInfluence: (III)Subjectivity . 123 4.2 TheConceptofObjectivation . 124 4.3 TheConceptofSubjectivation. 133 III FOUCAULT’S ETHICAL FRAMEWORK 5 THE FORM OF MORAL CONDUCT, FREEDOM, CRITIQUE . 154 5.1 Morality: Codes, Behavior, Self-Constitution . 157 5.2 TheStructureofSelf-Constitution. 162 5.3 Passive,ActiveandFreeSelf-Constitution . 167 5.4 Critique, Reason and the Idea of Freedom as a Practical Achievement . 175 v 6 BEYOND TRADITION: MACINTYRE OR FOUCAULT? . 181 6.1 MacIntyre’s Characterization of the Current State of Moral Discourse . 182 6.2 MacIntyre’sArgumentAgainstGenealogy . 190 6.3 MacIntyre’s Aristoteliansm or Foucault’s Nietzscheanism? . 200 IV FOUCAULT’S ETHICAL VIEWS THE CRITIQUE OF JURIDICAL REASON: AUTONOMY WITHOUT DUTY . 219 7 THE AESTHETICS OF EXISTENCE . 221 7.1 TheAestheticsofExistenceasaFormofCareoftheSelf . 224 7.2 The Aesthetics of Existence within Foucault’s Ethical Views . 239 7.3 Freedom, the Aesthetics of Existence and the Virtue of Critique . 255 VCONCLUSION 8 BEYOND NIHILISM: THE WILL TO TRUTH AND THE SELF-CONSTITUTING FORCE OF ETHICAL NORMS . 263 8.1 Foucault’s Conception of Truth: The Critique of Truth . 268 8.2 Truth, Regimes of Truth, and the Binding Force of Norms . 278 8.3 The Concept of Parrhesia and the Aesthetics of Existence . 292 REFERENCES . 297 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii Ihavehadthegoodfortuneofbeingsurroundedbymanycaring,encouraging,andbril- liant people. My advisers Arnold Davidson, Jocelyn Benoist, Raoul Moati and Anton Ford have been wonderful mentors. My first substantive intellectual encounter with Foucault’s work was through Arnold Davidson, in his seminar on The Birth of Biopolitics in the Fall of 2007. His intellectual incisiveness, cheerfulness and candor left a deep impression on me. He taught me how to read Foucault, and it is not exaggeration to say that much of what I have been doing since that seminar is working out the details of what I learned in it. A few years before that, when I was grappling to understand Husserl’s philosophical project, Jocelyn Benoist was invited to give a lecture on a course on the history of logic I was attending. His lecture was on Schlick and Husserl’s conception of the material apriori, and it left me in awe. In a certain sense, that was my first encounter with philosophy as a live discipline. It takes a philosopher to actually bring phenomenology back to its realist roots, to make its relationship to our everyday manifest without trivializing it or sacrificing its conceptual richness. This aspect of Jocelyn’s approach to phenomenology and to philosophy in general has been a source of inspiration ever since, and it has kept me anchored at times where various dialectical waves threatened to carry me away. Although we have not had many occasions to talk discuss philosophy with him in coffee shops in Paris, his visits to Chicago over the years have made it possible for us to have our good share of mille-feuilles in local bakeries. My friends and colleagues at the University of Chicago have enriched my life in so many ways... Santiago Mejía y Catalina Ospina, Gilly Nir and Abigail Akavia, Daniel Smyth and Leigh-Anne Smith-Gary, Matteo Vagelli, Luca Corti, Hannah McKeown, Dasha Polzik and Erik Swedlund, Nir Ben Moshe, Tes Davison, Zack Loveless, Kate Withy, Patrick Underwood, Amos Browne, Nic Koziolek, Alptekin Sanly have been stimulating interlocutors and fantastic friends. Tupac Andrés Cruz, Tuomo Tiisala, Dan Wyche, Francey Russell, Karl Hefty and Rafeeq Hasan have all been at different times coordinators of the Contemporary European Philosophy Workshop, where I was able to present work and receive very helpful feedback on viii several occasions. A subset of them have also been my closest Foucault interlocutors. I also take the opportunity to thank Austin Sarfan and Parker Henry, whose work as undergraduate assistants in a mentoring program in the department was very valuable. You’ve have truly been the best of my Uchicago experience. Thank you! Thanks to Paul Ashley and Raja Halwani of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago I have been able to teach at that fantastic institution. That has been an important part my development as a teacher. A François-Furet Travel Grant that the France-Chicago Center generously awarded me made it possible to carry out archival research in France which proved invaluable in the development of my project. During that trip, the staff of the IMEC at the Abée d’Ardennes zere enormously helpful in procuring the necessary authorizations to consult the archives. To my ’big sister’ Ana Belén de la Coromoto, and my young sisters Vanessa, y Alessandra, to my dear brother-in-law and friend Ben Whitford and my wonderful nieces Beatriz y Elena, and more than anyone to my mother Rosa and my father Ricardo, I wish I could convey how much I want to put in the words thank you when I address them to you: Thank you. And to Junko because more and more of this life!!! Thank you ix ABSTRACT x The goal of this dissertation is to bring into view the systematicity and explanatory force of Foucault’s ethical views, thereby filling important gaps in Foucault scholarship and in contemporary ethical discourse. The dissertation itself takes the form of an enquiry into the place and role of the notion of an aesthetics of existence in Foucault’s philosophical and ethical views. The method of enquiry is a reconstruction of the development of Fou- cault’s ethical, intellectual and political project, as well as of the conceptual framework and methodology that he developed in order to bring it to fruition. Particular attention is paid to Nietzsche’s influence on Foucault’s reconceptualization of the notions of truth, history and subjectivity in the early 1950s, and to the analysis of the relationship between subjectivity and truth that he carried out in the last stage of his career, from 1978 to 1984. The result of this work reveals that Foucault’s ethical views are based on novel conceptions of freedom, and of the normative structure of rational agency, and of the binding force of norms (of the kind of relation between individuals and norms that calls for the former to comply with the latter). On Foucault’s view, the ethical life today is not to be conceived as a life characterized by compliance with a code of norms which individuals are bound to obey by virtue of constitutive facts about the kinds of creatures that they are. The ethical life is to be conceived as a life characterized by the individual’s active, reflexive and sustained engagement in the project of constituting herself as an autonomous subject through the continued practice of piecemeal critique of both her ways of thinking and being, and of the ways in which she is called upon to think and to be within her culture. xi Part I Introduction 1 CHAPTER 1 ETHICS: THE WILL TO TRUTH AND THE AESTHETICS OF EXISTENCE In the concluding paragraph of his notes for the lecture delivered on February 29, 1984 at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault writes: The question of nihilism is not: if God does not exist, everything is permitted.
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