This book contains Foucault’s 1980 lectures at Dartmouth College, as well as additional contemporary materials. Footnotes show the differences between the text and the lectures delivered in Berkeley a few weeks earlier. The whole is carefully edited and includes an extensive critical apparatus. For the general reader, the importance of these lectures lies in the way on which Foucault presents a new research program, one that focuses on the ‘hermeneutics of the self’.

          The dictionary defines hermeneutics as ‘interpretation, specially of the Bible or literary texts’. Summarizing his project, Foucault tells the audience that he is interested in the ‘genealogy of the modern self’. This genealogy, which proposes to ‘get rid of a traditional philosophy of the subject’, is sketched from the point of view of ‘techniques of the self’, the most important of which, in our modern society, is ‘the interpretative analysis of the subject’ or ‘hermeneutics of the self’ (54-55 note). This program requires an understanding of the nature of the Hellenistic, Christian, and modern (Cartesian) ‘self’ or ‘subjectivity’.

          The first lecture introduces the nature of the project in typical Foucaldian fashion, describing the work of a 19^th century psychiatrist who treats one of his patients using cold showers. What is the psychiatrist trying to achieve? Not to teach the patient the delusional nature of his ideas, a type of treatment used for centuries. Instead, he wants the patient to admit his madness. This ‘confession’ is the transposition into psychiatry of a procedure used in judicial and religious practice. To confess has long been considered in the Western world a condition for punishment and for redemption. The cold shower exemplifies, according to Foucault, the relationships between ‘individuality, discourse, truth, and coercion’ (20). Following this initial conclusion, Foucault devotes a few pages to explain his project in the context of post WWII philosophy. The main problem of postwar French philosophy is to contest the notion that the subject is the foundation of every knowledge and the principle of significance. This notion came into attack from different quarters, including analytical philosophy, Marxism, and structuralism.  Foucault’s own project differs from those in realizing the role of the techniques or technologies of the self in the development of the subject in Western civilization.

          Of these technologies Foucault develops in these lectures only two. The first are the techniques used by the schools of pagan philosophy in the late ancient world. The goal of these schools was to transform the individual rather than to teach theories. But the nature and the techniques for the transformation of the individual differ from the ones that we will find later in Christianity in terms of what is targeted for examination and how is the examination conducted. Foucault explains those differences with two examples taken from the work of Seneca. The first one shows Seneca recommending the self-examination and evaluation of our behavior at the end of the day. The purpose of this examination is to remember and to measure the distance between what has been done and what should have been done. There is no reference here to some deep truth hidden in the subject. This examination could take place in solitude, but also can be made in the presence of others, e.g., an older friend, a relative, even a teacher. Again Foucault takes Seneca as an example, commenting on a confession made to him by one of his friends. What we find in this confession is ‘an accumulation of relatively unimportant details’ (33). Seneca’s friend is not seeking to discover in himself any profound desires, or some deep hidden truth. The kind of truth that Seneca has in mind is not regulated by a logic of what is hidden but by an ideal of coincidence between the subject of knowledge and the subject of will (36).

          After reviewing the care of the self in the ancient world, Foucault turns in the second lecture to Christianity. Christianity is a type of religion that imposes obligations of truth on the faithful. Among these, truths about the subject himself, about what is happening to him or herself, the temptations he is exposed to, play a central role. The form of this obligation of truth as we know it today, the auricular confession, is a relatively late result, of which Foucault traces summarily the early stages. Foucault claims that confession originates at the juncture of two different rituals, penance and confession. Penance is a status and a rite that consists of a dramatic and theatrical exposition of the penitent and his sins in front of the whole community. Foucault details several rituals associated with penance, the forms of humiliation and self-sacrificing that were prescribed for the penitent. But what penitence does not emphasize is the verbal disclosure of sins. This appears elsewhere, in confession.

Confession originated in the monastic communities, and is somewhat similar to the exercises practiced in the pagan schools of philosophy, modified under the influence of two fundamental principles of Christian spirituality: the principle of obedience and the principle of spirituality. Obedience is central for confession, and the kind of obedience practiced in the Christian communities creates a permanent and lifelong hierarchical relationship. In the pagan world, and for free males, obedience and subordination were only temporary and relative to the educational task, never permanent.  But not less important, according to Foucault, is the transformation in the purpose of the confessional examination. In pagan philosophy, the task was self-mastery.  In the Christian worldview, it was contemplation. The early forms of confession, as practiced in the monastic communities, centered in thoughts rather than actions (65), in their nature, quality, and substance (66).

          Foucault concludes the lecture with some general remarks that illustrate the importance of the preceding considerations. Foucault claims that modernity’s main challenge has been to preserve the ‘hermeneutic of the Self’ while replacing the Christian ideal of a self-sacrificing confessing man with a positive figure of man, what Foucault calls ‘anthropologism’.  Foucault also claims that while anthropologism still dominates the human sciences, its reign may be coming to an end. Our challenge is no longer to develop a positive foundation for the self but to change the technologies that give origin to this self, i.e., to practice what Foucault calls a ‘politics of ourselves’.

          Foucault pursues these brief studies of the origin and role of confession in Western culture in two texts recently published: Wrong-doing, truth-telling: The function of avowal in justice (2014) and On the government of the living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979-1980 (2014), both containing lectures given by Foucault the following year. The similarities and differences between the content of the Dartmouth lectures and these later lectures are discussed extensively in the excellent critical notes, which also include reference to Foucault’s sources and to parallel developments in his work.  

© 2015 Michael Maidan

Michael Maidan studied philosophy in Buenos Aires, Haifa and Paris-Ouest (Nanterre). He published several papers on the history of modern and contemporary social and political philosophy. Since 1990 he has lived in Miami, Florida.