Morten,
If I understand your question, I think you've put your finger on an
important point -- one that may even be said to characterize MF's work.
I'm not sure that there's an easy answer to your question, as evidenced
by the controversy over much of MF's work. Nevertheless, the question is
worth thinking about. But I want to point out a possible misreading of
MF. Well...to my mind it is a misreading.
MF wanted to reject universalizing ethics -- those ethics that
ultimately would be "acceptable by everyone" -- as you nicely point out.
And in the course of doing so, he shifts from somewhat "mechanistic"
examinations of the history of humans as objects within various
disciplines (sexuality, criminality, medicine...) and begins to write
(albeit near the end of his life) about the ways "in which the
individuals *as subjects* can and must be recognized." This shift to a
focus on individuals as subjects seems to mark MF's turn to a focus on
ethics.
If most of MF's work prior to his ethics (namely, the archaeologies and
genealogies) had attempted to dissolve questions of normativity and the
subject itself, the final turn would appear to recenter normativity and
the subject.
However, it is worth remembering that for his part, MF took himself to
be doing something other than seeking to replace modern ethics with
ancient ones. In Dreyfus and Rabinow, MF states explicitly (p.231, 2nd
ed) that he is *not* "looking for an alternative" to contemporary ethics,
even though it may seem to the reader that he is championing the ancient
regard for the "care of the self."
Nevertheless, MF does note that he sees similarities between the
problems encountered by (i) contemporary society and "recent liberation
movements," on the one hand, and (ii) those considerations encountered by
the ancient Greeks, on the other hand.
He points to two factors that influence his thought in this direction.
First, he notes that "in Greek ethics people were concerned with their
moral conduct, their ethics, their relations to themselves and to others
much more than with religious problems." Second, he notes the lack of an
institutional system or systems poised to intervene and enforce conduct
within Greek society: "For instance, the laws against sexual misbehavior
were very few and not very compelling."
Thus, MF wonders "if our problem nowadays is not, in a way, similar to
this one, since most of us no longer believe that ethics is founded in
religion, nor do we want a legal system to intervene in our moral,
personal, private life."
I suggest that while this indicates MF's willingness to recenter the
subject and questions of normativity, it would be misleading to say that
he is suggesting a return to ancient forms of ethics. Rather, I think he
is looking for similarities between contemporary and ancient questions
about ethics -- but his focus is on much broader, perhaps *formalistic*
questions rather than on the *content* of those ethics.
After all, he does point out that we are deceiving ourselves if we
simply adopt one system of ethics in place of another, for we simply
adopt as part of that alternative system all of its attendant problems.
So his point isn't to embrace the ethics of the Ancients, only to learn
what we can from those ethical systems.
To me, this is what makes MF well worth studying: the fact that he seems
to be willing to learn from history without falling prey to the
deceptions of nostalgia.
Peace,
Blaine Rehkopf
Philosophy
York University
CANADA
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