Philosophy as a way of life

"Ecriture de soi," 13 M. Foucault took as his point of departure a remarkable text concerning the therapeutic value of writing, which I had studied in Exercices spirituels. 14 According to this text, St Antony used to advise his disciples to write down their actions and the emotions of their souls, as if they were going to make them known to others. "Let writing take the place of the eyes of other people," Antony used to say . This anecdote leads M. Foucault to reflect on the various forms adopted in antiquity by what he calls the

"writing of the self." In particular, he examines the literary genre of hypomnemata, which one could translate as "spiritual notebooks," in which one writes down other people's thoughts, which may serve for the edification of the person writing them down. Foucault15 describes the goal of this exercise in the following terms: the point is to "capture what-has-already-been-said

[capter le dijti-dit]," and to "collect what one may have heard or read, with a view to nothing less than the constitution of the self." He then asks himself,

"How can we be placed in the presence of our selves with the help of ageless discourses, picked up from any old place?" And he replies as follows: "this exercise was supposed to allow one to turn back towards the past. The contribution of the hypomnemala is one of the means by which one detaches the soul from worries about the future, in order to inflect it toward meditation on the past. " Both in Epicurean and in Stoic ethics, Foucault thinks he perceives the refusal of a mental attitude directed toward the future, and the tendency to accord a positive value to the possession of a past which one can enjoy autonomously and without worries.

It seems to me that this is a mistaken interpretation. It is true that the Epicureans - and on{v the Epicureans - did consider the memory of pleasant moments in the past as one of the principal sources of pleasure, but this has nothing to do with the meditation on "what-has-already-been-said" practiced in hypomnemala. Rather, as we saw above, 16 Stoics and Epicureans had in common an attitude which consisted in liberating oneself not only from worries about the future, but also from the burden of the past, in order to concentrate on the present moment; in order either to enjoy it, or to act within it. From this point of view, neither the Stoics nor even the Epicureans accorded a positive value to the past. The fundamental philosophic attitude consisted in li1•l1tR ;,, tht flrtsmt, and in possessing not the past, but the

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present. That the Epicureans also attached a great deal of importance to the thoughts formulated by their predecessors is a wholly different matter. But although hypomnemata deal with what has already been said, they do not deal with just anything "already said," the only merit of which would be that it is a part of the past. Rather, it is because one recognizes in this "thing already said" - which usually consisted in the dogmas of the school's founding members - that which reason itself has to say to the present. It is because one recognizes, in the dogmas of Epicurus or Chrysippus, an ever-present value, precisely because they are the very expression of reason. In other words, when one writes or notes something down, it is not an alien thought one is making one's own. Rather, one is utilizing formulae considered as apt to actualize what is already present within the reason of the person writing, and bring it to life.

According to M. Foucault, this method made a deliberate attempt to be eclectic, and therefore implied a personal choice; this then explains the

"constitution of the self."

Writing as a personal exercise, done by oneself and for oneself, is an art of disparate truth; more precisely, it is a way of combining the traditional authority of what has already been said, with the singularity of the truth which asserts itself in it, and the particularity of the circumstances which determine its utilization.

In fact, however, personal choice is not to be found in eclecticism, at least for the Stoics and Epicureans. Eclecticism is only used for converting beginners.