Meanwhile, nestled amongst the shelves of Macquarie Library amongst which I am supposed to research metabotropic receptors and validity shrinkage, I've found a copy of Foucault's lectures on The Hermeneutics of the Subject. Baldly :) , it 'rawks'.
Eventually I hope to be able to describe in detail a bunch of meditative practices that are oriented around the contemplation of paradox. Meanwhile, I was looking for a way to adequately distinguish between what philosophy, and what spirituality, is, because I'm interested in building a solid birthing point for these practices. It's less about justification and rationalisation than it is about a healing, of sorts, that is at it's most effective when the subject (that is, us) is able to most deeply comprehend the territory that we encounter. It's hard to describe what I'm on about, until you actually feel it, but after a lifetime of marginalising sensitivities, I'm on about setting a path to the soapbox to give them some air time.
Foucault more than meets my meagre demands regarding the philosophy/spirituality distinction. Blessed be his wire-rimmed glasses, blessed be the clear space of his Nietzschean self. There's a little more of a focus on 'truth' than I had given creedence to in my thinking. I like the challenge of this - I consider 'truth' to be a word like 'God' - it's chief function amongst us humans devolves more towards discord than harmony. I need to consider truth's relevance.
Anyrate, in brief, Foucault is attempting to reshape what he perceives to be a skewed Western interpretation of gnothi seauton, 'know thyself', by arguing that knowing oneself can really only take place a framework that he argues was established by Socrates, the epimeleia heautou, 'the care of the self'. The skew happened by virtue of the Cartesian split, where 'knowing yourself' became the fundamental privileged way of right access to the truth. In the same movement he argued that the care of the self was completely discredited and remains so, by our culture.
' Let's stand back a little to consider this. We will call, if you like, 'philosophy' the form of thought that asks, not of course what is true and what is false, but what determines that there is and can be truth and falsehood and whether or not we can separate the true and the false. We will call 'philosophy' the form of thought that asks what it is that determine the conditions and limits of the subject's access to the truth. If we call this 'philosophy' then I think we could call 'spirituality' the search, practice and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth. We will call 'spirituality' then the
set of these researches, practices, and experiences, which may be purifications, ascetic exercises, renunciations, conversions of looking, modification of existence, etc, which are, not for knowledge but for the subject, for the subject's very being, the price to be paid for access to the truth.'
He goes on to say spirituality in the West has three characteristics:
1) It postulates that the truth is never given to the subject by right - it is not a simple act of connaissance, rather, 'he must be changed, transformed, shifted, and become, to some extent and up to a certain point, other than himself. The truth is only given to the subject at a price that brings the subject's being into play. '
2) The conversion can be a movement of the subject from his current status and condition - Foucault calls this eros (love) or askeisis (work), where the subject takes responsibility for a long labour of transformation.
3) While the truths at the outcome have the necessary function and limitation of the spiritual approach used to gain them, there are what he calls 'rebound' effects, the effects of the truth upon the subject.
Truth is not just knowledge for the subject, truth here 'enlightens' the subject - giving beatitude to the soul. The very being of the subject is transfigured.
At this point he states that the Gnostic movement, in it's overloading of connaissance with spiritual implications actually violates his whole argument. He wants us to have a look at the conditions of this knowledge, and to acknowledge :) that the 'rebound effect', the full implications of this, can be most adequately realised and described in the face of non-knowledge, in an ongoing encounter with an ever deepening sense of the world. Truth cannot save the subject. Knowledge cannot save the subject. Care of the self, I think we will find, is what he postulates as our potential salvation.
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