Foucault and Ethical Subjectivity

Abstract

ne striking discovery of Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Modernity is that no morality is formulated in modernity. Modernity thinks so much of the unthought that it fails to address the ethical question of how one is to live well. 1 Thinking the unthought is constitutive of "modern morality," which is not morality at all. 2 If morality is nothing but the effort to answer how one is to live well, then, modernity fails to address this moral, ethical question. When "man" 3 emerges as the positive figure in the field of knowledge, modern thought needs to grapple with those dim, yet positive forces that motivate action. "What is essential [to modern episteme] is that thought, both for itself and in the density of its workings, should be both knowledge and a modification of what it knows, reflection and a transformation of the mode of being of that on which it reflects." 4 1 In its effort to conceive man, modernity, Foucault opines, reflects on the duality of the cogito and the unthought which characterizes man's mode of being; hence, in Foucault's own neologism, the "cogito-unthought duality." This duality is an expression of the basic reality of man both as an experiencing subject and the never-fully-understood or often-misunderstood object of that experience. By understanding human consciousness as inextricably linked to the unthought, modernity is "a form of reflection…that involves, for the first time, man's being in that dimension where thought addresses the unthought and articulates itself upon it." Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 325. 2 Traditionally, morality consists of two aspects: "moral code" and "morality of behaviors." While morality as "moral code" refers to a prescriptive ensemble of values or rules of action, "morality of behaviors" refers to the real behavior of individuals with respect to the rules and values recommended to them. Foucault says that there is more to Morality than this. He identifies another form that complements the traditional form of morality. This is Foucault's "ethics," the rapport á soi. The kind of relationship one ought to have with oneself, "ethics" determines how the individual is supposed to constitute himself as a moral subject of his own actions.