Care of the Self and Pastoral Power

In his lecture of 13 January 1982, we get a glimpse of how the Greek care of the self might be linked historically and genealogically to Christian pastoral power.

The Socratic dialogue circles around the following logic:

Q: How should I govern?
A: By learning to govern oneself.
Q: And how should I learn to do that?

This passage begins with reference to the “double failing of pedagogy”—schools are poor, and amorous desire interferes in other mentor-student relations. In essence, you can’t rely on teachers to learn to govern; you can only rely on yourself: one has to take care of oneself. “Actually, you can see that the two things are connected: taking care of oneself in order to be able to govern, and taking care of the self inasmuch as one has not been governed sufficiently and properly. ‘Governing,’ ‘being governed,’ and ‘taking care of the self’ form a sequence, a series, whose long and complex history extends up to the establishment of pastoral power in the Christian Church in the third and forth centuries.” (HS 44-5)

Can we infer what happens to this sequence governing-being governed-taking care of oneself as pastoral power gathers force?

We should start with the differences between the governor and the governed in the two societies Foucault investigates. In “Omnes et Singulatim,” Foucault notes that for Aristotle the politician’s task was not to oversee the well-being of each and every citizen individually, but “to weave a strong fabric for the city” (OS 234) within which a host of others (bakers, doctors) can look after people’s well-being. On the other hand, the pastor/shepherd is precisely concerned with the lives of every individual. It is a profoundly “nosey” and centralized kind of power, poking its head into every dusty corner.

This new, pastoral relation between governor and governed is achieved through a transformation of the very techniques we saw described as care of the self. The shepherd is bound to the flock because his salvation is found only through the salvation of the flock, which entails a thoroughly “individualizing knowledge” (OS 237) of every member of the flock. This individualizing knowledge is secured through the flock’s voluntary submission to the shepherd—a submission in turn secured through two techniques that the flock should exercise on themselves: self-examination and guidance of conscience (OS 237).

So what has happened to these Greek techniques in pastoral power? First, even though self-knowledge in each case is achieved in reference to some transcendent point—the “divine element” (HS 71), the Christian God—the object of this self-knowledge—what it is we need to learn about—has changed: the soul-subject of Greek practices has been replaced by the soul-substance (HS 56-7). It seems to me that we can think of this soul-substance in terms of what Foucault calls in “Omnes”, the pursuit of “self-identity” (which is what results in each person’s “mortification” (239)). Second, the relationship to authority embedded in these practices has been transformed. Being guided by conscience is no longer a temporary situation of getting some advice to survive hard times; it becomes a whole state of being, and the only way to insure that one is not lost. Conscience, in other words, is exercised through total submission to the shepherd. And self-examination is no longer a way “to close self-awareness upon oneself”; it becomes a way to “open it up entirely to its director—the unveil to him the depths of the soul” (238).

The series governing others-being governed-caring for oneself, which completed the circuit of political power in Greek society, has been “rewired,” and no doubt more efficiently, by Christian thought. The series is now obedience-knowledge of oneself-confession (239). In effect, whereas the question of, ‘how shall I govern?’ was first answered with reference to the governor’s self vis-à-vis the divine, in the pastorate it is answered with reference to the total knowledge of the governed, who are meant to submit and confess all. The techniques of the care of the self have been transferred from governor to governed. The site of political action is no longer the body-soul of Alcibaedes, but the mind of each member of the flock. And the aim of politics is no longer governing well, but governing efficiently.

This, then, seems to be another Foucauldian paradox. The totalizing and individualizing form of pastoral power that defines the modern state is actually exercised primarily at the level of (and, in fact, by) the subject. For me it becomes interesting to try to think of activities like psychotherapy (or yoga, as in Dan’s case) as modern forms of “care of the self.” Do these trouble the exercise of pastoral power, and, at the same time, the modern state? Or is Foucault’s account of governmentality at the same time an account of the ways that new forms of care of the self have continually been integrated into governing projects?