In a 1983 interview, Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus asked Foucault to differentiate his ideas on the art of living from Sartrean Existentialism. His answer is important for understanding the relationship between ethical practices of the self and assumptions about the human condition. According to Foucault’s answer, Sartre’s “theoretical insight” was that “the self is not given to us” in the sense that existence precedes essence — the self is always something that must be created. He faults Sartre for not following up on this theoretical insight by pursing its “one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art” (Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 262). Rather, Sartre’s embrace of “authenticity” undermined this theoretical insight. It made the practices of creating “the self” into the expression of an underlying necessity — that the self has a prior truth that it must recognize and conform to — “to be truly our true self” (262). In other words, we must create ourselves with the assumption that there is some authenticity we each have, and that we must discover and commit to it wholly and completely.

I’m sure that those who are committed to Existentialism would rightly quibble with this characterization, but I do find it useful for someone like me who is interested in “Philosophy as a Way of Life” — that is, using philosophical thoughts and practices as a way of making a conscious and continuous effort to live my life in alignment with a set of values that are always under scrutiny and revision. Aside from the criticism of not accepting the “practical consequence” of his theoretical insight, Foucault is pointing out in his response a methodological difference between Sartre and himself that I want to explore in this meditation. The difference is subtle but highly consequential if one wants to take seriously the relationship between “the self” and the practices we undertake to create the selves that we want to be.

The difference has to do with the starting point of the philosophical undertaking. In Sartre, Foucault saw a faulty starting point. By making a commitment to one’s own authenticity into the starting point, two consequences follow:

First, the ethical practices that one uses to create oneself are reflections of the primary problem of finding one’s true self. These practices can be made visible in Existentialist philosophical enquiry, but only so that they can be judged as good or bad practices based on their relationship to authenticity. If you end up creating your authentic self, then your ethical practices are good; if not, then you need to find new ones. It leads to hierarchies of humanity based on one’s relationship to their own authentic choices. See Sartre’s inauthentic waiter and deBeauvoir’s hierarchical and condescending categorization of humanity in The Ethics of Ambiguity.

Foucault rejects this need to define practices as reflections of a prior set of fundamental human problems and commitments. This was his rejection of “the subject” as a starting point for philosophical thought. Rather than seeing ethical practices as reflections of a more fundamental human condition, Foucault saw ethical practices as objects of inquiry in their own right. He gives primacy to practices, not to underlying assumptions about what we might think our species is struggling with. In this way, Foucault tried to see the underlying assumptions about humanity and its struggles as part of the practices themselves. This is a profound reversal of Existentialism while still resembling its program to some degree. Both Foucault and Sartre see “the self” as an outcome of the practices one undertakes to direct attention to experience, feelings, thoughts and the others we live with. But Foucault refuses to judge practices as good or bad based on an underlying assumption about what a truly good self is and should be. Foucault would see Sartre’s commitment to authenticity as a choking off of the freedoms that are possible when one takes the practices themselves as the primary object of inquiry.

I find it depressing to think about my day-to-day practices of reading, writing, self-reflection, being a good husband and father and friend, and all the other practices I engage in every day as somehow being inauthentic if I haven’t found the right foundation for them. How exactly do I undertake this search of myself? What interpretive framework do I use as the source of that authenticity — Freudian psychoanalysis? Marxism? Catholicism? Bhuddism? Stoicism? Epicureanism? Any of the variations of Islam? There are so many to chose from. The stakes are awfully high if there is only one authentic answer that makes the difference between a successful self and a failed one.

The second consequence is yet more subtle, and I am tempted to say that it is not fully formulated in Foucault’s thinking before his death in 1984. If an “authentic self” can be understood as an outcome of practices, then these practices have no inherent requirement to yield a stable self. If the committed Existentialist sees the self as something to be attained through its quest for authenticity, Foucault would see that attainment as optional. We can hear him treading in this direction when, in an earlier part of the Dreyfus and Rabinow interview, he says, “And I think that one of the main evolutions in ancient culture has been that this tekhne tou bio [art of living] became more an more a tekhne of the self” (260). Here we see that the self as an aim and an outcome of ethical practices has its own genealogy. One could, therefore, easily envision ethical practices that prevent the self from being attained — as is the case with some meditative practices of Bhuddism today.

These two consequences of Sartre’s Existentialism drive that philosophy toward seeing the human condition as a problem of “meaning.” Existentialism starts its thought process from assertions about the human condition — ambiguity (deBeauvoir), Absurdism (Camus), authenticity and commitment (Sartre). To be sure, these are not necessarily eternal human conditions for Existentialism (or Absurdism if we are compelled to differentiate Camus from Sartre/deBeauvoir). For instance, I don’t think that Camus thought that the myth of Sysiphus is representative of an eternal human condition. Rather, Sisyphus is representative of a modern and historical human condition (“the absurd man”), which is why he spends so much time leading up to his analysis of the myth by reviewing prior philosophers and their philosophies of life. Camus’ Absurdism can only emerge once broadly accepted frameworks of meaning, like Christianity, are no longer credible bases for finding meaning in life. In this sense, Absurdism is an historical phenomenon that results from modernity’s killing off of the Christian God.

For Foucault, this amounts to just swapping an eternal source of meaning given by priests with an equally conformist human source of meaning given by the philosopher. The Christian priest says, “You are a sinner and must be saved by doing these prescribed practices that will hopefully lead to God conferring his saving grace on you.” The Existentialist philosopher says, “You are condemned to be free, but your freedom will be false if it is not authentically pursued.” In either case, both the priest and the philosopher can point to people who are doing it right and others who are doing it wrong. The ethical practices for each are judged based on their ability to produce the kind of stable self that is envisioned in the definition of the underlying human condition. Sure, we’ve done away with a prescriptive God and His priests, but we’ve replaced them with authenticity and philosophers.

Foucault said that he had to create a new method in order to fully undo this bias in 20th Century philosophy. He says as much in an interview more than a year after the Dreyfus and Rabinow interview that I’ve been focused on:

Q: But you have always “forbidden” people from talking to you about the subject in general.

M.F.: No, I have not “forbidden” them. Perhaps I did not explain myself adequately. What I rejected was starting out with a theory of the subject — as is done, for example, in phenomenology or existentialism — and, on the basis of this theory, asking how a given form of knowledge [connaissance] was possible. What I wanted to try to show was how the subject constituted itself, in one specific form or another, as a mad or a healthy subject, as a delinquent or nondelinquent subject, through certain practices that were also games of truth, practices of power, and so on. I had to reject a priori theories of the subject in order to analyze the relationship that may exist between the condition of the subject or different forms of the subject and games of truth, practices of power, and so on. (290)

Here we have a clear statement about the problems that come with trying to found one’s philosophy on underlying assumptions about a human condition (or a “theory of the subject,” which amounts to a theory of the human condition). The biases that come from Phenomenology and Existentialism as a result of this approach limited their ability to fully understand these underlying problems as themselves part of the creative practices of living. To see life as needing to have meaning and for there to be no cosmological basis for meaning is itself a choice and part of a practice of living a philosophical life. These biases easily lead to practices that seek to bring about universal resolutions to those universal problems often with disastrous consequences. Thus Heidegger embraced Hitler, and Sartre flirted with Stalin.

Foucault wanted to elevate the practices themselves, at the end of his life, to having pride of place as a way of envisioning freedom. I want to spend some of my next meditations on what it means to focus on the primacy of the practices and avoid founding them on prior assumptions about a human condition or a theory of subjectivity. My intention is to make my way through early Christian asceticism as a starting point and then delve into Bhuddism. Christian asceticism presented itself first and foremost as a set of consciously adopted practices that would fully and completely transform one’s way of life. By looking closely at how the Desert Fathers wrote about those practices, I believe that I’ll find some early thinking that took the primacy of practices seriously. When a man or woman chose to be a monk, their choice meant adopting codified practices (right down to the dress code) that would be a total way of life. The practices weren’t secondary or incidental to the choice. To identify as a monk was to identify as one who abides by these prescribed practices as a total commitment. Of course, the monk doesn’t seek the practices themselves; rather, the monk is seeking a “state of mind” that is achieved though the practices. In other words, to choose to be a monk was to choose to live by these practices that would yield the Christianized self as a “state of mind.” If the practices are followed only in a rote fashion, the effect will not be achieved.

Bhuddism will lead, I think, in a different direction. I’m interested in forms of Bhuddism that see the attainment of a stable self as something to be avoided. This is new territory for me, and it will take some time to understand.