Ethics as a Process

Foucault’s elaboration of an ethics of care of the self was intended as an alternative to modern moral systems. Of course, care of the self as Foucault focused on it was almost entirely an ancient ethical practice caught up in the cultural atmosphere of late Greek and early Roman antiquity. As such, it is clear that this ethics cannot be easily imported into the modern context to which Foucault was addressing himself. The ethics of the care of the self will require significant revision if it is to be meaningful and viable in contemporary contexts. That said, there are certain elements of an ethics of care of the self which are already immediately relevant to contemporary ethical contexts, and these elements can be used to assist in a rethinking of our contemporary ethical practices. These elements, I think it was Foucault’s point, do not require significant revision in order to be deployed with effectiveness in contemporary settings. Is the idea of 'ethics as a process' one of these central ideas which Foucault finds relevant for modern moral philosophy?

The crux of modern ethical practice, as Foucault described it in such works as Discipline and Punish and The Will to Know, was an attempt to divide power from freedom. We might say, then, that modern ethics is problematized around the oppositional relation between power and freedom. This oppositional relation constitutes the core problem for modern moral systems. Almost every modern moral system is an attempt to show how we can effectively disentangle power and freedom in such a way that conceptualizes their relation as oppositional.

Foucault elaborated the ancient ethical tradition of care of the self as an alternative to the modern approach insofar as care of the self is described by him as specifically emphasizing the way in which power and freedom are intensely and inevitably interleaved with one another. This turn to ancient ethical practice in terms of the interlocking relation between power and freedom can be conveniently reformulated in the terminology employed in his work on power: “Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are ‘free’.” The ethics of self-care specifically focuses on this intrinsic interrelation between power and knowledge and as such offers an alternative to the modern moral systems of the fascist and the freespirit. What was this alternative? How did it work? What did it look like? Obviously these question leave a great deal open.

One of the most interesting features of care of the self is the way in which Foucault tends to describe it as a 'spiritual' practice or process in contrast to a 'philosophical' theory or knowledge. The idea for him is that care of the self comes into being by being practiced. It is not a morality that already exists which we can come to know. What is at stake in this contrast between a dynamic ethics of process and a static ethics of knowledge? Does it presuppose a valid and accurate portrait of modern moral philosophy? And is Foucault's alternative itself viable?

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From Genealogy to Problematization

An important question provoked by Foucault's later works on ethics and subjectivity concerns the issue of why Foucault felt he had to expand his genealogical work to take problematization into account. What does problematization add to genealogy? What, if anything, does it subtract from it? Is problematization crucially associated with Foucault's third axis (in addition to knowledge and power) of ethics or subjectivity? Could problematization also be associated with some other domain or axis of analysis? A few thoughts on these questions follows.

The much-debated question of why Foucault shifted from archaeology to genealogy can be answered in this way: whereas archaeology offers a static analysis of practices synchronically pulled from the past, genealogy offers a dynamic analysis whereby these practices can be viewed diachronically as historical processes themselves. Genealogy enabled Foucault to explain historical change and continuity. In this way, genealogy was an expansion of archaeology rather than a refutation of it—of course genealogy refutes a few assumptions made by archaeology, but on the whole it refutes these assumptions by reinterpreting the key elements of the earlier approach. Perhaps, then, problematization expands genealogy in a similar way. Few would, I think, want to urge that Foucault’s ‘problematization’ refutes or abandons his ‘genealogy’. An approach to an answer might be: problematization expands the analysis of historical change by describing it in terms of the purposive action of agents. No longer can change merely be an effect of something basic to history (e.g., Marxist materialism or Foucaultian power dynamics)—change can now be seen as effected by purposive agents who are internal to the practices under analysis.

This perhaps helps illuminate ways in which Foucault’s work successively expanded domains of analysis according to these successive expansions of methodology. One could write an archaeology of knowledge (Foucault did this), or power, or subjectivity. There have been numerous archaeologies of power, Foucault would readily admit. But in order to connect any two of these axes together, to explore their interlocking tensions, one needs to adopt the diachronic perspective of the genealogists. This is why Foucault’s work on genealogy was provoked by the urge to internalize power into his analysis of knowledge—but to do this Foucault realized that he could not remain at the level of archaeology. Could one also have written the genealogy of knowledge/subjectivity? Perhaps, but what Foucault seems to have suggested with his own work was that in order to inflect a genealogical analysis with purposive agency, we need to expand our methodology so as to embrace all three axes of knowledge, power, and subjectivity.

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The Concept of Problematization

Foucault often described his late work in the history of ethics in terms of the concept of ‘problematization’. But Foucault seemed to use ‘problematization’ in at least two senses. What are the relations between these two senses of 'problematization'? Do they suggest a tension in Foucault's own approach or rather a delicate nuance which we must be careful to discern?

In one sense, he described it as the work which the historian does to direct the work of thought toward present practices which were once seen as stable but which the historian shows to be problematic in some crucial sense. For instance, Foucault once offered the “problematization of a present” as “the questioning by the philosopher of this present to which he belongs and in relation to which he has to situate himself” (“The Art of Telling the Truth” in Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p.88)

In a second sense, Foucault described his work as ‘the history of problematization’ such that his historical inquiries would aim less to problematize present practices and instead be focused on the way in which certain practices have been subjected to problematization in history. This is the way in which Foucault seemed to describe his work in the methodological “Introduction” to the second volume of The History of Sexuality. Foucault here describes himself as analyzing “the problematizations through which being offers itself to be, necessarily, thought—and the practices on the basis of which these problematizations are formed” (p.11). Foucault goes on to clarify that he is not so much problematizing concepts by writing their histories as he is writing the histories of there having been problematized: e.g., madness or crime as problematized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or sexuality as problematized in Stoicism and early Christianity.

This all provokes the question, for me, of whether or not these two senses of problematization are related to one another. Are they compatible? If they are compatible are they two aspects of the same process?

One possible answer would be that these two senses of problematization feed into one another. The historian of problematization provides practical exemplars from the way in which the problematizing critic of the present can direct our focus toward current practices. At the same time, since Foucault’s own domain of analysis for his history of problematization, sexual ethics, is so central to our own culture, it is difficult to believe that one could trace the way in which, and the reasons why, these ethics have varied through history without provoking in at least some sense the thought that at present our own sexual ethics needs to be more carefully considered. This, of course, seems plausible, but it also does not appear that Foucault spelled out this connection with sufficient detail. Is the history of problematizations the only way to problematize the present? Are there other routes to this? And must the history of problematizations provoke a critical attitude toward our present? Could it, instead, be used to justify present modes of practice? These are difficult questions which, I hope, a careful reading of The Hermeneutics of the Subject might help us resolve.

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