I’ve been reading up on Foucault for possible participation in a faculty ethics seminar late this spring that hopes to focus on the question of the moral self. I found myself reading a lecture by Tom Beaudoin that uses a Foucauldian approach to “poach” some new methods of selfcraft from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Christian theologian who was martyred by the Nazis.
Beaudoin finds four new methods of selfcraft in between the lines of Bonhoeffer’s prison letters:
- “giving himself to feelings of existential separation,
- “acknowledging a felt indebtedness to others,
- “practicing an active memory in regard to his own history,” and
- “finding solidarity with the sufferings of others and with his own sufferings.”
Is “poaching” a method we should use to find new selfcrafts? If so, who should we “poach?” Is there a methodology we should develop? Even looking at the Bonhoeffer example, how would you go about each of his four practices? Are there raw practices–say, certain types of meditation, confession, or prayer, to give some examples–that can be used arbitrarily for any gleaned selfcraft? Can we decide that we’ll apply method A to feeling existential separation, method B to felt indebtedness, and method C to personal history and solidarity with the suffering? It sets us up with something of a mix and match game, a connect the dots approach to selfcraft. Or perhaps all we’re saying is that selfcraft also is briccolage.
New phrase for me: the “apophatic self.” Beaudoin’s own? Beautiful way around the question of self vs. no-self; and brings a certain theological beauty to the problem: the self is ultimately affirmed only through its denial.
