Critique of Foucault’s Aesthetic Self: the Danger of Narcissism
Higher forms of authenticity, in Taylor’s language, means a self that is connected to a moral horizon larger than that entailed by radical self-determination. The higher form is more concerned for its recognition by, and resonance with, other people, including external accountability and social interdependence. Foucault seems to lack a concept or structure of non-oppressive mutual accountability and life-promoting communal interdependent moral dialogue. By overplaying his hand on the aesthetic and the creative in his ethics, he has stripped morality down to the minimalist free self-articulation of the individual.
He has reduced morality to a single component, its beauty. In speaking of Foucault’s emphasis on the aesthetic, Taylor (1991) writes:
The notion that each of us has an original way of being human entails that each of us has to discover what it is to be ourselves. But the discovery can’t be made by consulting pre-existing models, by hypothesis. So it can be made only by articulating it afresh. We discover what we have it in us to be by becoming that mode of life, by giving expression in our speech and action to what is original in us. The idea that revelation comes through expression is what I want to capture in speaking of the “expressivism” of the modern notion of the individual. (Taylor, 1991, p. 61)
Discovery of self happens through self-making (projection of a creative self onto the screen of life). The individual self must hold itself in existence: “I am what I am because of what I make of me.” Thus the aesthetic self is in danger of simply evaporating into nothingness. Ironically, nihilism is the perfect philosophical environment for aesthetic self-creation. Is this why Foucault saw self-creation as a continual process, an ongoing labour, a struggle of creation and recreation, a necessary yet treacherous deconstruction and reconstruction process? Read More…
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