The return of morality: an examination of Michel Foucault’s concept of an individual’s morality as a lawless universality
Tighe, Ian
(2023)
The return of morality: an examination of Michel Foucault’s concept of an individual’s morality as a lawless universality.
PhD thesis, Dublin City University.
Michel Foucault describes how, using technologies of the self, those practices of self on self,
necessarily learned in processes of spiritual direction, an individual is enabled to self-constitute
an ethical subjectivity, and then, by conducting her own conduct, enjoy a singular style of living
that reflects an unmitigated relation between her freedom and truth. The history of these ancient
technologies also describes the constitution of ‘ways of being’ or attitudes independent of
external power and of unique styles of living in ancient Greece, without reference to essential
subjectivity. Foucault’s exposition of this freedom to self-constitute a unique style of existence
is to answer the questions: where a concern for truth constantly calls truth into question, what
is the form of existence which makes this questioning possible and what life is necessary given
that an imposed truth is not necessary? By opposing concepts of self and trans-subjectivation
in a new conception of ethics as a relationship of self to self, Foucault demonstrates how a
subject might transform herself and refuse to renounce herself as obliged by the deployment of
knowledge (connaissance). He asks whether this ethical subject might sustain a modern
morality that will, no longer, need to be supported by either traditional ideology, code, or law?
The Return of Morality is an exploration of these ancient Hellenistic technologies of selfsubjectivation and their possible use today as the condition of possibility, according to
Foucault, for modern strategies that refuse the limits imposed by the internal ruse of freedom
and the inverted image of modern forms of pastoral power that govern self-identification and
individualisation. This technology might allow the re-establishment of self-government and
enable a style of living that might be called a unified morality for today, one referring to all life
experience, one that exists outside of imposed code and law.