Time for Foucault? Reflections on the Roman Self from Seneca to Augustine

Autor/innen

  • James I. Porter University of California, Berkeley

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i0.5247

Schlagworte:

Self, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Heraclitus, Augustine, Cosmos, Stoicism

Abstract

The essay approaches the idea of the self as this was most often formulated in antiquity from Heraclitus to Augustine—not as the object of self-fashioning and self-care, but as an irresolvable problem that was a productive if disconcerting source of inquiry. The self is less cultivated than it is “unbounded,” less wedded to regimes of truth and discovery than it is exposed, precariously, to crises of identity and coherence in the face of a constantly changing and unfathomable world. The self on this view of it does not conform to the accounts that are given by Foucault, Hadot, or Gill. Readings of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Augustine are used to support this first attempt at an alternative picture of the self in antiquity.

Literaturhinweise

A. A. Long, "Finding Oneself in Greek Philosophy," Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 54, no. 2 (1992)

A. A. Long, From Epicurus to Epictetus: Studies in Hellenistic and Roman Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 2006) https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199279128.001.0001

A. A. Long, Greek Models of Mind and Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674735910

Andrea Nightingale, "The 'I' and 'Not I' in Augustine's Confessions," Arion 23, no. 1 (2015)

Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)

Brooke Holmes, The Tissue of the World: Sympathy and the Nature of Nature in Greco-Roman Antiquity (forthcoming)

Charles H. Kahn, "Discovering the Will: From Aristotle to Augustine," in The Question of "Eclecticism": Studies in Later Greek Philosophy, edited by John M. Dillon and A. A. Long (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)

Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)

Christopher Gill, The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

David Sedley, "Marcus Aurelius on Physics," in A Companion to Marcus Aurelius, edited by Marcel van Ackeren (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)

Edward Hussey, "Heraclitus," in The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, edited by A. A. Long (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

Étienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, translated by Peter Snowdon, revised and enlarged edition (London: Verso, 1998)

G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)

Gilbert Simondon, L'individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d'information (Grenoble: Millon, 2005)

Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003)

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973)

Jacques-Alain Miller, "Extimité," Prose Studies 11, no. 3 (1988) https://doi.org/10.1080/01440358808586354

James I. Porter, "Foucault's Ascetic Ancients," Phoenix 59, no. 2 (Special issue: "Interrogating Theory—Critiquing Practice: The Subject of Interpretation," edited by W. Batstone) (2005)

James I. Porter, "Jacob Bernays and the Catharsis of Modernity," in Tragedy and Modernity, edited by Joshua Billings and Miriam Leonard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)

Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self's Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012)

Judith Butler, "The Desire to Live: Spinoza's Ethics under Pressure," in Politics and the Passions, 1500-1850, edited by Victoria Kahn, Neil Saccamano, and Daniela Coli (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009)

Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015)

Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012)

Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004)

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, with Selected Correspondence, translated by Robin Hard. With an introduction and notes by Christopher Gill (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)

Michel Foucault, "About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth," Political Theory 21, no. 2 (1993) https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591793021002004

Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984. Volume I, edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997)

Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York and London: Routledge, 1988)

Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: Volume 3 of The History of Sexuality, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986)

Michel Foucault, The Courage of the Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983-1984, edited by François Ewald, et al. (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982-1983, edited by François Ewald, et al. (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230274730

Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-82, edited by Frédéric Gros (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09483-4

Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1985)

Michel Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, edited by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press; Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2014)

Pauliina Remes, "Inwardness and Infinity of Selfhood: From Plotinus to Augustine " in Ancient Philosophy of the Self, edited by Pauliina Remes and Juha Sihvola (Dordrecht and London: Springer, 2008)

Phillip Cary, Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)

Pierre Hadot, "Reflections on the Idea of the 'Cultivation of the Self'," in Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, edited by Arnold I. Davidson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995)

R. B. Rutherford, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: A Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)

Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, translated by John Davie. With an introduction and notes by Tobias Reinhardt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)

Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989)

Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)

Downloads

Veröffentlicht

2017-01-06

Zitationsvorschlag

Porter, J. I. (2017). Time for Foucault? Reflections on the Roman Self from Seneca to Augustine. Foucault Studies, (22), 113–133. https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i0.5247

Ausgabe

Rubrik

Special Issue on Foucault and Roman Antiquity: Foucault's Rome