The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II; Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983-1984 (Michel Foucault Lectures at the Collège de France, 11)

According to the Wikipedia entry about Michel Foucault (1926-1984), his mother enrolled him in a Jesuit educational institution in France in 1941. The Jesuit order was founded by the Spanish (Basque) mystic St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), who wanted Jesuits to be noted for their vow of obedience – and for their ministries, of course. In the Roman Catholic Church, men and women in religious orders usually take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. But ordinary lay Catholics do not take these vows.In any event, from January 1971 until his death in June 1984, Foucault taught at the College de France, except for a sabbatical year in 1977. He held the chair in the history of systems of thought. Broadly speaking, systems of thought can include the Christian traditions of thought. Foucault’s appointment at the College de France obliged him to provide twenty-six hours of teaching a year in the form of a course of public lectures or seminars. For example, his course of lectures in 1979-1980 was posthumously published as the book On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the College de France 1979-1980, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), in which Foucault discusses medieval Catholic practices of confession extensively.In Foucault’s 1981 lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain in the book Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, edited by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt, translated by Stephen W. Sawyer (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Foucault continues his exploration of medieval Catholic practices of confession. Not surprisingly, Foucault’s 1981 lectures somewhat overlap with his 1979-1980 lectures.Now, in the posthumously published book The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the College de France 1983-1984, edited by Frederic Gros, translated by Graham Burchell (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Foucault mentions the Franciscans and Dominicans (pages 29 and 182), but not the Jesuits – not even when he mentions the Reformation (page 247) – in connection with the theme of parrhesia (roughly, courage to tell the truth) that runs through this entire course of lectures (see the index for specific page references).At first blush, Foucault’s failure to mention the Jesuits hardly seems significant. But here’s the catch: Foucault also says very provocative things about obedience as it emerged historically in the medieval Catholic tradition of thought and was practiced by Catholics in religious orders (pages 320-321, 330, 334, 336, and 337) – including, of course, later on, Jesuits. For Jesuits, their vow of obedience extended to the general superior in Rome, their provincial of their province (regional governing unit), the rector of their particular Jesuit community, their spiritual director, and the retreat director each time they made a retreat. St. Ignatius Loyola served as the first Jesuit superior general, and he also served as the retreat director and as the spiritual director of most of the earliest Jesuits.However, as the Jesuit order grew in numbers, the general superior in Rome was not able to meet regularly with individual Jesuits for one-to-one spiritual direction. Consequently, the custom arose for each Jesuit provincial to meet once a year for the required manifestation of conscience by each Jesuit under his care.Now, my favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) in English at Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri (USA). Like Foucault, Ong’s 400 or so publications include discussions of various systems of thought, including the Christian tradition of thought – and Jesuit spirituality.Ong’s three most important publications about Jesuit spirituality are the following:(1) the article “‘A.M.D.G.’ [Ad majorem Dei gloriam, For the greater glory of God]: Dedication or Directive?” in the now-defunct Jesuit-sponsored journal Review for Religious, volume 11, number 5 (September 15, 1952): pages 257-264; reprinted in Review for Religious, volume 50, number 1 (1991): pages 35-42; also reprinted in volume three of Ong’s Faith and Contexts (Scholars Press, 1995, pages 1-8).(2) the article “St. Ignatius’ Prison-Cage and the Existentialist Situation” in the Jesuit-sponsored journal Theological Studies, volume 15, number 1 (March 1954): pages 34-51; reprinted in Ong’s book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (Macmillan, 1962, pages 242-259); also reprinted in volume two of Ong’s Faith and Contexts (Scholars Press, 1992b, pages 52-67).(3) the book Hopkins, the Self, and God (University of Toronto Press, 1986), the published version of Ong’s 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto, in which Ong revisits the famous expression ad majorem Dei gloriam that is abbreviated as A.M.D.G. (pages 78-81 and 87).Because Foucault discusses the practice of obedience in the medieval Catholic tradition extensively in his 1983-1984 lectures in the book The Courage of Truth, perhaps I should say here that Ong’s discussion of the Jesuit tradition of thought about the discernment of spirits involved in decision-making strikes me as relevant to the Jesuit understanding of obedience.Because Foucault discusses medieval Catholic practices of confession extensively in his 1979-1980 lectures in the book On the Government of the Living and elsewhere, perhaps I should mention here that Ong discusses the Catholic sacrament of confession in his 1986 book Hopkins, the Self, and God (pages 99-106). Ong refers to Bernhard Poschmann’s book Penance and the Anointing of the Sick, translated from the German and revised by Eugene L. Donahue, S.J. (Herder and Herder, 1964; orig. German ed., 1951). But Foucault refers to Poschmann’s big 1940 book in German about the sacrament of penance (page 170).Now, from November 17, 1950 to November 16, 1953, Ong lived in a Jesuit residence in Paris from which he traveled to libraries in Continental Europe to track down book by the French logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572). For Ong’s books and articles about Ramus and Ramism, and about certain other significant French authors, the French government dubbed Ong a knight in 1963 – by the French Ministre de l’Education Nationale in a ceremony at Saint Louis University. However, as far as I know, Foucault does not discuss any of Ong’s 400 or so publications.In any event, Ong’s massively researched doctoral dissertation was published, slightly revised, by Harvard University Press in two volumes in 1958: (1) Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason and (2) Ramus and Talon Inventory. Basically, Ramus and Talon Inventory is an annotated bibliography listing more than 750 volumes (most in Latin) by Ramus and Talon and other Ramists and critics of Ramus that Ong tracked down in over 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe.Incidentally, according to the Wikipedia entry about the College de France, it traces it founding back to King Francis I of France in 1530, who was important in Ramus’ life, as Ong explains in his 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (pages 23-24, 25-26, 48, and 175).Briefly, in Ong’s all-important book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, Ong sees Ramus and Talon and other Ramists as pioneering a shift in subjectivity that contributed to the history of philosophy in Western culture in the so-called Age of Reason (also known as the Enlightenment). On page 338, in note 54 of his all-important 1958 book, Ong explicitly acknowledges that he borrowed the visual-aural contrast that he works with as a heuristic guide from the French philosopher Louis Lavelle. Ong sees the Gutenberg printing press that emerged in Western culture in the mid-1450s as further enhancing the visualist tendencies already at work in Western culture in philosophy and Christian theology.However, as far as I know, Foucault never read Ong’s all-important 1958 book. Nor did Foucault ever discover the pre-philosophical thought-world of pre-literate cultures – characterized by the outward turn of consciousness. But the Western tradition of philosophy exemplified by Plato and Aristotle emerged under the influence of vowelized phonetic alphabetic literacy, which fostered visualist tendencies and the inward turn of consciousness.See Eric A. Havelock’s book Preface to Plato (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963) – a book that Ong never tired of referring to.Also see Andrea Wilson Nightingale’s book Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context (Cambridge University Press, 2004).Now, in Foucault’s 1983-1984 lectures in The Courage of Truth, he says, “The second major difference is of a completely different order. This concerns the importance that Christianity, and only Christianity gives to something which is not found in either Cynicism or Platonism. This is the principle of obedience, in the broad sense of the term. Obedience to God conceived as the master (the despotes) whose slave, whose servant one is; obedience to His will which has, at the same time, the form of law; obedience finally to those who represent the despotes The lord and master) and who receive an authority from Him to which one must submit completely [e.g., the abbot of a Benedictine monastery, or the rector of a Jesuit community]. So it seems to me that the other point of inflection in this [i.e., his] long history of asceticism recounted in counterpoint, facing this relation to the other world (l’autre monde) as true life to obedience to the other in this world [e.g., the abbot of a Benedictine monastery, or the rector of a Jesuit community], starting from this world, and in order to access to true life. There is true life only through obedience to the other, and there is true life only for access to the other world. This way of pinning the principle of the other life (la vie autre) as true life to obedience to the other in this world and to access to the other world in another life (l’autre monde dans autre vie), this way of pinning together a Platonic element and another specifically Christian or Judeo-Christian element [Foucault did not know Hebrew and does not discuss the Hebrew Bible, except in the Greek translation known as the Septuagint], this connection is what introduces the two major inflections of Cynic asceticism and brings about the change from the Cynic to the Christian form of asceticism. This difference between paganism and Christianity should not be characterized therefore as a difference between a Christian ascetic morality and a non-ascetic morality of Antiquity. You know that this is an utter fantasy. Asceticism was an invention of pagan Antiquity, of Greek and Roman antiquity. So the non-ascetic morality of Antiquity should not be set against the ascetic morality of Christianity. Nor, I think, should we follow Nietzsche, if you like, and contrast an ancient asceticism of a violent and aristocratic Greece, with a different form of asceticism which would separate the soul from the body. The difference between Christian asceticism and other forms of asceticism which may have prepared the way for and preceded it should be situated in this double relation: the relation to the other world to which one will have access thanks to the asceticism, and the principle of obedience to the other (obedience to the other in this world, obedience to the other which is at the same time obedience to God and to those who represent him). Thus we see the emergence of a new style of relation to self, a new type of power relations, and a different regime of truth” (pages 120-121; the French words in parentheses are supplied here by the translator; I have supplied the material in square brackets).I am here suggesting that that “new style in relation to the self” is central to the Jesuit vow of obedience. Moreover, that “new style in relation to the self” involves a further development of what Ong refers to as the inward turn of consciousness. For Ong, the inward turn of consciousness stands in contrast to the outward turn of consciousness of traditional cultures before the impact of phonetic alphabetic literacy and its gradual interiorization – heightened in Western culture after the emergence of the Gutenberg printing press in the mid-1450s.For further discussion of the outward and the inward turns of consciousness, see David Riesman’s famous book The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (Yale University Press, 1950).Now, the public forms of parrhesia in antiquity that Foucault discusses tend to involve the outward turn of consciousness. But the letter-writing forms of parrhesia in antiquity that Foucault discusses tend more toward the inward turn of consciousness.Elsewhere, Foucault sys, “the Christian, as such, who believes in the name of the Son of God, knows that he has eternal life. Second, he addresses God to ask for what? Nothing other than what God wills. To that extent, man’s prayer or will is nothing other than the reduplication or return to God of His own will. Principle of obedience. Parrhesia is anchored in this circularity of, on the one hand, belief in God and certainty of eternal life, and, on the other, a request which is addressed to God and which is itself nothing other than God’s will. Parrhesia is the confidence that God will hear those who are Christians and who, as such, have faith in Him, ask of Him nothing other than what is in accordance with His will” (page 330).Or something like that.In the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, we find the following prayer (known in Latin as the Suscipe):“Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and all my will – all that I have and possess. You, Lord, have given all that to me. I now give it back to you, O Lord. All that is yours. Dispose of it according to your will. Give me love of yourself along with your grace, for that is enough for me” (standardized numbered section 234.4-5; I am quoting the American Jesuit George E. Ganss’ 1992 translation here).Now, elsewhere, Foucault says about the back-story centuries before the Jesuits, “with the increasing stress on obedience in Christian life, in Christian practice and institutions, in relation to oneself as well as in relation to truth, this relationship of confidence, in which parrhesia consists, on man in himself, sustained a relationship of confidence in God, this confidence (in salvation, in being heard by God, in being close to God, in the soul being open to God), will become obscured, as it were, and wavers in relation to its own principle and its first axis, becoming clouded over. And this theme of parrhesia-confidence will be replaced [When? Where? How?] by the principle of a trembling obedience, in which the Christian will have to fear God and recognize the necessity of submitting to His will, and to the will of those who represent Him” (page 333).This kind of trembling obedience based on fear is not part of Jesuit spirituality. But the Danish Protestant religious writer Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) published a famous book titled Fear and Trembling (1843). However, Foucault does not happen to advert explicitly to it here.Elsewhere, Foucault says, “This is what characterizes parrhesia: non-fear of God, non-mistrust of self, and non-mistrust of the world. It is arrogant confidence” (page 336). As examples of supposedly “arrogant confidence,” we might consider various Hebrew prophets, the historical Jesus, Paul the Apostle, and perhaps even Augustine of Hippo. But these examples of supposedly “arrogant confidence” come from antiquity – when ancient cultures were still predominantly characterized by the outward turn of consciousness.But Foucault then says, “Where there is obedience there cannot be parrhesia” (page 336). However, Foucault to the contrary notwithstanding, Jesuit spirituality stands as a direct contradiction of his bold claim here.Nevertheless, Foucault then constructs a fascinating account of two supposed poles in later Christianity: (1) the parrhesiastic pole and (2) the anti-parrhesiastic pole (page 337). Foucault claims that “this parrhesiastic pole was [Is?] the source of what could be called the great mystical tradition of Christianity” (page 337) – a mystical tradition that includes the mystic St. Ignatius Loyola.Foucault also says that the “anti-parrhesiastic pole in Christianity” “founds not the mystical, but the ascetic tradition” (page 337). Of course, earlier in his course of lectures, Foucault sees the pre-Christian tradition of asceticism in a positive light. However, apart from brief experiences of nature mysticism, it seems to me that Christian mystics also practiced some forms of asceticism – St. Ignatius Loyola certainly did.The second hour of Foucault’s lecture on March 28, 1984 then comes to an end on page 338. He died on June 25, 1984.Now, “the great mystical tradition of [Western] Christianity” has been described in Bernard McGinn’s multi-volume work titled The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (1992, 1994, 1998, 2005, 2012, 2016, and 2017). In volume six, part two, titled Mysticism in the Golden Age of Spain 1500-1650 (2017), McGinn discusses St. Ignatius Loyola and the early Jesuits (pages 62-113).

Very powerful lecture, I was very moved by Foucault's lecture on Socrates. I think this is one of the best piece of philosophy I have ever came across, especially Foucault. We in United States have been missing a great piece of Foucault since the lectures were not accessible or at least not available in English.I will re-read it again soon, I am planning to write a paper on it.

Foucault last course is an erudite and well-balanced one in the study of the structure for Antic and Modern question of courage in the world of increasing human (mind) politicization (universities, political parties), especially in the early 80 of the last century in both BLOCKS (USA, Western world versus CCCP and the Communist world).A ,,sovereign life,, - said Foucault quoting and commenting Seneca- is ,,a life of assistance and help to others,,; and a life of providing personal and concrete exemples of courage and freedom (of speech). I view this course as a rare piece of important and original comments and problem-oriented methods in the study of Ancient Greek history and philosophy. Of course, Foucault problem-ized and experimented new ways of analyzing/inquiring the Ancient and Modern subject of truth.Dr. Lucian Popescu, historian

Absorbing

Well, the content is Foucault, so it's very interesting, and it requires a lot of concentration and keeping up. However, I love the book as a whole, the physical book, the paper, texture and how it feels. It's a good print.

I haven't read this one yet. I like his transcribed Lectures from The College de France so much because you feel you are in the room listening to Foucault. His books are a delight in a different way. But when you hear his initial thinking on a problem he has begun to work on, it is easier to understand as Foucault always makes a supreme effort to be as clearly understood as he possibly can make it. It is NEVER his style to sound so erudite you can't understand what he is saying and you certainly can't think about its meaning for you. Reading Foucault is like scouring your mind with baby fine steel wool so you can reorder and use what you already know and have stuffed in there i a format that grows fuzzier all the time. Is this why so much Alzheimers?This book along with one of his last books Fearless Speech is timely now because of the information Edward Snowden has released to the world. Snowden is a great contemporary parrhesiastes the like of which we have not seen since Solzhenitsyn, and by an ironic twist of fate the place of asylum has switched. Nietzsche would boom in laughter about that. His beware whom you choose for an enemy advice.If it is by Foucault it is a special treat.

I am not going to write something about the content of the book. Whether we agree with Foucault or not, his lecture notes are must-reads in social theory. The english translation is good which makes the notes accessible. However, there is something I wanted to say (with the hope that someone from Picador would see, though probably it is too late): the print quality is extremely bad. In total, I have most of Foucault's lecture notes (6-7 books, all published by Picador), and their print quality is way lower than what I print from my own printer. Even the colour of the pages changed (into dark-yellowish) only in a few years. Honestly, I don't understand why such important material is published with the lowest printing quality.

OTHER BOOKS OF FOUCAULT I FOUND HARD GOING, BUT NEVERTHELESS PROFOUNDLY RIVETTING. HIS LECTURES IN THE COURAGE OF TRUTH ARE BRILLANTLY COMPOSED SO THAT THEY LEAD TO THE DEVASTING HONESTY AND INTELLECTUAL PERSPICACITY OF HIS CONCLSUSION: THE FEARLESS TRUTH-SAYING OF THE CYNICS WAS EVENTUALLY REVERSED INTO THE HUMILITY, FEAR AND TREMBLING REQUIRED BY CHRISTIANITY. FOUCAULT WAS (IS) AN ORIGINAL AND MONUMENTAL INTELLECTUAL.