nunia
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作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
一位真正的自由主义者 by 王丹
http://www.newcenturynews.com/Article/gd/200707/20070726094041.html
Beyond Apologia: Respecting Legitimate Differences of Opinion While Not Toadying to Dictators--A Reply to Richard Rorty
Randall Peerenboom
I would like to thank Richard Rorty for taking the time to offer a thoughtful response to my article. As he notes, I am generally sympathetic to his philosophical approach and personally share many of his liberal views. I also agree with much of what he says in his response. With that in mind, in the context of discussing a couple of issues raised in his response I would like to highlight some differences between us.
In debating whether democracy and human rights are universally applicable it seems to me necessary to avoid two extremes. On the one hand, those who think that democracy and human rights may not be the answer to a particular country's problems at a particular time often accuse their universalist counterpart of being ethnocentric, suggesting that the universalist's views are the product of a misguided, hegemonic imperialism--images of the ugly American impervious to cultural differences spring to mind. To be sure, the description may fit to some extent in some cases. Nevertheless, it tends to focus the discussion on the motives of the party rather than the substance of the arguments--the empirical and normative issues that underlie the claim that democracy and human rights in some form and to some degree are universally applicable goods. Given the prima facie appeal of democracy and human rights around the world and the evils of the more popular alternatives, liberals need not apologize for their suggestion that other countries would do well to adopt some form of democracy and rights. Nor need liberals shy away from confronting dictators bent on genocide in the name of some misguided notion of liberal tolerance. At the same time, liberals need to bear in mind that the world is a big place and that people have different values and ways of doing things. Not everyone shares their predilection for liberal values: for diversity, autonomy, authoritychallenging individuals, and so on.
On the other hand, universalists or ethnocentric liberals often criticize those who do not share their fondness for one-size-fits-all-made-in-America solutions for serving, perhaps unwittingly, as apologists for corrupt tyrants. Again, the criticism should not be dismissed out of hand. In many cases, to a lesser or greater extent, the accusation may be accurate. We must always ask what are the alternatives to democracy and human rights? What are the weaknesses of the proposed alternatives?1 Who benefits and who loses? In this case, motives seem somewhat more relevant simply because political systems that deny people the right to vote are often dominated by elitist groups whose self-interest is a major obstacle to the realization of democracy. Surely there is no need to accept at face value the self-serving claims of leaders in Beijing that authoritarian rule is necessary to prevent China from degenerating into social chaos. Nor is it necessary to accept uncritically the worried cries of elites that China's rural peasants are not educated or sophisticated enough to vote.
Similarly, we should be wary of the claims of China specialists whose careers have been built largely on finding interesting differences between the traditions, philosophies, and political systems of China and the West. Countries are not locked into their past. Democracy was alien to Western countries too. As Rorty points out, our forefathers also had reservations about giving the vote to the masses. And many Asian countries, for their part, have broken out of the fetters of their authoritarian pasts to adopt some version of democracy and human rights.
Clearly we want to avoid becoming the apologist of dictators. But what separates apologia from genuine disagreement? Again, focusing too much on the motives of the parties may detract from important substantive issues. PRC leaders who worry about disorder may be motivated by self-interest--but they may be right to worry. Elites who fear the dramatic changes that might result from giving the vote to China's rural majority may be thinking of their own place in society--but their fears may be legitimate. Only a context-specific examination of the arguments pro and con will tell.
Rorty suggests that his assertion that China would be better off with democracy and human rights is just an empirical claim. Just as aspirin is effective in curing our headaches and thinning our blood, so democracy is effective at producing greater human happiness. It is at this point that our views begin to diverge.
The differences appear to be threefold. First, I think the empirical record is more ambiguous with respect to the merits of democracy.2 Second, any claim about the applicability and desirability of democracy and human rights is both an empirical and a normative claim. Third, while some form of democracy and human rights may be desirable, Rorty champions a particular liberal version that goes beyond support for the medicinal effects of a generic drug to favor one particular brand over various competitors. Just as different brands of headache medicine may work better for different individuals, so may different versions of democracy and human rights suit different countries.
The assertion that democracy and human rights will result in greater human happiness has not always been borne out in practice. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a watershed period for democracy, with more than fifty nondemocratic states becoming democratic.3 However, many of these fledgling democracies have encountered serious difficulties. Democratic governments have not been able to deliver on their promises to improve the material standard of living of the people. Even when there is economic growth, it is often accompanied by unequal distribution of wealth, mismanagement of state assets, and widespread corruption. A 1996 poll of seventeen Latin American countries found that only 27 percent of the people were happy with the way democracy worked.4 In some states such as Poland, disenchanted voters have reinstated the communist party, whose removal had only been won a short time earlier after years of struggle. In other states, decidedly unhappy citizens have taken to the streets to protest the lack of growth, the increasing gaps between the rich and poor, corruption, social disorder, the rise of criminal gangs, and so on. Others, giving in to a sense of impotence, simply waive their hardwon right to vote.
As an empirical matter, the relation between economic development and democracy is not clear, though the weight of the evidence seems to suggest that Rorty is putting the cart before the horse. Numerous studies by political scientists and sociologists have shown that economic development is a prerequisite to democracy.5 At least one recent study has concluded that economic development causes democracy but democracy does not cause economic development.6 To be sure, economic development is not sufficient for political reform and the emergence of democracy. Countries may develop economically and not become democratic.7 Moreover, it is not clear that democracy is an impediment to economic development. But, then, neither is it clear that in some circumstances a more authoritarian form of government would not be more conducive to economic development than a democratic government. Certainly the economic success of Asian countries such as Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and China--all varying in their degree of authoritarianism and economic success but hardly liberal democracies, at least during their period of major growth--should lead the result-oriented pragmatist to stop and question whether democracy is really the best path for some developing countries.8
In short, there may be legitimate differences over means even if we agree that democracy and human rights are the desired ends. At minimum, we ought not dismiss as mere apologists all those who suggest that nondemocratic forms of governments may in some circumstances be more appropriate for transition economies and may be better at producing economic gains that will lay the foundation for future democracy. Equally sincere and reasonable people may reach different conclusions on these issues that have nothing to do with self-interest or a desire to appease dictators.9
Whether democracy will produce greater human happiness will also depend on what you mean by happiness. Democracy and human rights have their costs. Taking rights seriously means that in some cases the rights of the individual will trump the will of the majority and perhaps even what is in the interest of society as a whole. Accordingly, promoting democracy and human rights inevitably raises important normative issues that implicate our most fundamental values and our views about the relation between the individual and state and the proper balance between the individual and the group. Rorty concedes these and other costs of liberalism but is willing to accept them. Others may reasonably disagree.
But if we are to make any headway in addressing the normative issue of the value of democracy and human rights, we need to draw a distinction between the core institutions of democracy and basic human rights and the liberal values that undergird one particular version of democracy and human rights. There will most likely be more agreement on the merits of certain institutions and some basic rights than on Rorty's own liberal version of democracy and rights. Rorty favors autonomy, diversity, self-realization, and individuals who constantly challenge authority. His response, for the most part, focuses on the less controversial need for certain democratic institutions and the basic rights necessary to make these institutions work: a free press, a free judiciary, free universities, an apolitical civil service and non-
governmental organizations, and so on, rather than the more contentious litany of liberal values.
Yet the main point of contention is over the values that support democracy and human rights and give it a different shape and feel in different countries. Values are important because they will affect the choice of institutions or particular institutional arrangements as well as where a society draws the line on specific issues. Even if China accepts the principles of a free press and free speech, it must still decide how these principles are to be interpreted and implemented in practice.
At the end of the day, I have a hard time imagining that in the long run China will not adopt the basic institutions of democracy. But I have an equally hard time imagining that the purpose of democracy in China will be to create the widest possible range of diversity and Brandoesque individuals who will challenge authority at every turn. It is precisely because of such fundamentally different goals and orientations that we will be able to enjoy diversity on a global scale. While I would like to see China provide, and believe China is morally and legally obligated to provide, political dissidents the rights conferred on them by the PRC Constitution and various international treaties to which China is a signatory, I would not want to see China turned into another wasteland of strip malls or a series of inner-city war zones populated by gun-toting teenagers not likely to see their twenty-first birthday. Such "diversity" is not useful in the U.S. or elsewhere. In some respects, it may be too late for Western liberal democracies and the U.S. in particular to turn back the clock and avoid some of the extremes of radical diversity, autonomy, and individualism. But it is not too late for China. As a late bloomer, China may be able to take some lessons from its liberal predecessors and avoid some of the dysfunctional practices of the U.S. In any event, it is not unreasonable for China to aspire to such an alternative vision of democracy and human rights.
Notes
1 - In many cases, the proposed alternatives are based on hopelessly vague attempts to chart a third way between socialism and capitalism or between China's traditional philosophies, political systems, and legal institutions and the institutions and values of contemporary Western liberal democracies. Or else they are based on overly idealistic accounts of what a properly revisioned Confucian society would be like that fail to take into consideration the negative aspects of Confucianism or to explain adequately how the negative aspects that are an integral part of the conceptual cluster of Confucianism can be hived off or combined with basic democratic institutions and rights to form a coherent whole. Their appeal is often based more on their telling critique of the realities of contemporary Western liberal democracies than from the plausibility of their own alternative normative vision. But that need not be the case. One need only look at Japan, Taiwan, or Singapore to see a range of possibilities for a political system that accepts the basic democratic institutions and some version of human rights
and yet is colored by the infusion of traditional non-Western (and in particular Confucian) values. Liberals may prefer the U.S.--but it is not hard to imagine that others would prefer Japan, Taiwan, or Singapore. Ironically, someone who takes irony and contingency as seriously as Rorty does is most likely to appreciate that the contingent fact of being born in a particular society and being shaped by its norms and narratives goes a long way toward determining our preferences as to the kind of society we want to live in.
2- Moreover, even if it is generally true that democracy leads to greater human happiness, that would not prove that democracy would necessarily lead to greater happiness in the particular case of China at this particular historical moment.
3- Larry Diamond, "Is the Third Wave Over?" Journal of Democracy 7 (3) ( July 1996 ): 20-37.
4- Robin Wright, "Democracy: Challenges and Innovations in the 1990s," Washington Quarterly 20 (3)( 1997 ): 23-26.
5- Ross Burkhart and Michael Lewis-Beck, "Comparative Democracy: The Economic Development Thesis," American Political Science Review 88 (4) ( 1994 ): 903.
6- Ibid., p. 907.
7- Zehra Arat, "Democracy and Economic Development: Modernization Theory Revisited," Comparative Politics 21 ( 1988 ): 21-36.
8- Of course not all authoritarian states achieve economic development. Authoritarianism is not sufficient for development.
9- I do not mean to imply that I think a Neo-Authoritarian approach is necessarily the right approach for China. At this point, the question for me remains an open one. There are good arguments on both sides, and I simply have not seen enough evidence to decide the issue conclusively one way or the other. But then, given that Rorty has not, as he acknowledges, studied the issues as they relate to China in any great detail, and given that the empirical data is not conclusive on the general issue of the relation between democracy and economic development (much less greater human happiness), it seems to me that one may in good faith question his empirical prediction that democracy and human rights would produce greater happiness in China, at least at this particular historical juncture.
"Sensitive killers, cruel aesthetes, and pitiless poets": Foucault, Rorty, and the ethics of self-fashioning *
by Graham Longford
From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.
Michel Foucault
Instead of an ethic of reciprocity or brotherliness, Foucault opts for what we might call a dramaturgical model of conduct, in which action becomes meaningful solely qua performative gesture. But this theory risks sanctioning an approach to ethics that is brazenly particularistic and elitist. Formally, it remains only a hair's breadth removed from Nietzsche's rehabilitation of the right of the stronger.
Richard Wolin
One should see the intellectual qua intellectual as having a special, idiosyncratic need--a need for the ineffable, the sublime, a need to go beyond limits [...] But one should not see the intellectual as serving any social purpose when he fulfills this need.
Richard Rorty
Suspicion that the work of Michel Foucault harbors ethical and political ambiguities and outright dangers pervades critical commentaries upon it. In particular, his embryonic notion of the "aesthetics of existence," inspired by the Greco-Roman ethics of self-fashioning, or "the care of the self," has been seized upon in this regard. (1) This suspicion dovetails with the chorus of criticism heard over the last decade in which post-structuralist thought in general has been denounced as ethically and politically dangerous. (2) Richard Wolin, for example, rattles the chains of "Thrasymachus' ghost" and conjures the specter of the predatory Nietzschean immoralist in a bid to discredit Foucault. (3) Along with Wolin, critics such as Jurgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, and Thomas McCarthy argue that an interest in self-fashioning and the aestheticization of ethics more often than not belies an underlying elitist preoccupation with the self which pays inadequate attention to our obligations to others. (4) An aestheticist approach to ethics and the self, so the argument goes, encourages a deficit of care for others and threatens, by privileging the criterion of beauty above all other considerations, to underwrite violence and cruelty in the name of aesthetic self-perfection. Accordingly, such an approach to ethics signals not a new form of ethical practice but the demise of ethics altogether. Putting the matter in traditional terms, critics of Foucault would argue that pursuit of the aestheticized, poststructuralist good life of self-creation will inevitably conflict with the dictates of justice, that is, with our obligations to others. The prototypical Foucauldian individual, these critics might say, would make a very poor neighbor and fellow citizen. In the following essay I respond to some of the concerns of Foucault's critics by examining the ethical and political implications of his endorsement of an ethics of self-fashioning. In particular, the essay responds to criticisms that Foucault's writings on self-creation belie the anti-social and elitist tendencies of an "aesthetic modernist" by arguing that, as a mode of self-relation best suited to the radical contingency of existence, the aesthetics of existence is not only not an invitation to ignore or abandon our obligations to others but that a certain Foucauldian art of the self may well serve to cultivate relations of care and concern for others.
In the course of defending Foucault's aesthetics of existence the essay also refers to the work of the liberal anti-essentialist thinker Richard Rorty, who, like Foucault, endorses a certain ethic of self-creation--"strong poetry"--in response to the contingency at the root of our inherited vocabularies, identities, and practices. (5) Rorty's work on self-creation is noteworthy and useful on a number of counts. Firstly, despite the anti-essentialist views they share, Foucault and Rorty offer quite distinct models of ethical self-fashioning with divergent implications for relations of care and concern for others. A heuristic contrast of Foucault's aesthetics of existence with Rorty's strong poetry reveals that there is more than one model of self-creation available to would-be self-fashioners, and that, on closer examination, the kind of narcissistic and callous aestheticism about which Foucault's critics rightly worry has much more in common with the model of self-creation embodied in Rorty's strong poet. As a result, in my view much of the criticism of Foucault's aesthetics of existence has been misdirected.
Furthermore, despite their agreement on the importance of self-creation, Foucault and Rorty hold conflicting views on the scope and relevance of its practice in relation to questions of justice, politics, and social solidarity. While Foucault endorsed the aesthetics of existence as having the potential to infuse our relations with others with greater care and concern, Rorty sides with Foucault's critics in finding that the ethic of self-fashioning is, at best, irrelevant to our relations with one another and, at worst, downright dangerous, which leads him to recommend that its practice be confined to solitary activities in private life. Therefore, I treat Rorty as an implicit interlocutor of Foucault's on the question of the social and political implications of the ethics of self-fashioning. Like Foucault's non-liberal critics, Rorty limits the form that the ethics of self-fashioning can take to one obviously anti-social one. One can, however, as the present essay tries to show, take care of oneself in the Foucauldian sense without disregarding others. Indeed, under certain circumstances, one cannot properly and humanely attend to others without having attended to oneself in this way first.
I. Foucault on the Aesthetics of Existence
Contrary to the prevailing view that Foucault's later work on ethics constitutes a break from his genealogical and archaeological past, I would argue that one cannot account for the former without first returning to the latter. Inspired by Nietzsche, his various archaeological and genealogical studies attempt to show that "there is `something altogether different' behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence has been fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms." (6) "The world we know," he continues, "is not this ultimately simple configuration where events are reduced to accentuate their essential traits, [...] On the contrary, it is a profusion of entangled events." (7) So it goes for the concept of human nature: "nothing in man--not even his body--is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition." ( In the wake of this "death of Man," we are faced with the challenge of exercising our freedom and fashioning our shared forms of life in the absence of the touchstones previously supplied by humanism and other faiths.
Without overlooking the risks of such a predicament, Foucault tended to stress the opportunities for new forms of freedom and creativity afforded by it. Indeed, in spite of his own archaeological and genealogical writings documenting the degree to which what we have become--the things that we think, say, and do in the present--is contingent upon a host of underlying epistemic and strategic conditions of possibility, Foucault argued that people are nonetheless "much freer than they feel." (9) While there is little doubting that our contemporary forms of thought and practice have been made, produced that is on the basis of a web of contingent relations and events of which we are often only dimly aware, nevertheless "they can be unmade, as long as we know how it was they were made." (10) As the successor to philosophy, genealogical inquiry will seek to "break down, to disassemble, the unity of the apparently self-evident concepts from which philosophers and social scientists generally begin" in order to reveal that they are "products that have within themselves a certain heterogeneity." (11) As individuals, meanwhile, we must face up to the task of producing ourselves. "From the idea that the self is not given to us," Foucault argued, "I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art." (12) To this slackening in the order of the necessities once imposed on us by concepts like human nature and universal morality, "one responds, or must respond, with research which is that of an aesthetics of existence." (13) Under the circumstances, for Foucault, the paradigmatic individual takes the shape of a figure like Baudelaire, for whom "modern man [...] is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets, his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself." (14) Foucault saw this creative work done on the self by the self as a kind of ethical practice, one which he explored in the final two published volumes of his history of sexuality, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, as well as other late writings and interviews. Together, then, the pursuit of genealogical criticism and the art of the self form the complementary philosophical and ethical elements of Foucault's posthumanist "critical ontology of ourselves," which he equated with the kind of ethos most appropriate to our times, one in which "the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them." (15)
Reaction to Foucault's late ethical writings from critics and commentators was swift and largely negative. Jurgen Habermas registered ethical concerns about Foucault's putative affinities with the "aesthetic modernism" of "nihilistic dark writers of the bourgeoisie" like Nietzsche, which he equates with irrationalism, nihilism, and amoralism. (16) Richard Wolin and Allan Megill assimilated Foucault's work to Nietzsche's "pan-aestheticism," in which the notion of the aesthetic as a separate and autonomous sphere of activity is rejected in favor of aestheticizing the whole of existence. (17) According to Wolin, dedifferentiating aesthetic and ethical experience leads necessarily to "aesthetic decisionism," the tendency to aestheticize and instrumentalize others as mere material for one's own self-fashioning, with disturbing implications for human empathy, mutuality, and solidarity. (1 The pan-aestheticist position, he claims, gives carte blanche to "forms of life that are manipulative and predatory." (19) Thus, Foucault's ethics of self-fashioning "favors either an attitude of narcissistic self-absorption or one of outwardly directed, aggressive self-aggrandizement." (20) Similarly, Martin Jay has warned that Nietzschean preoccupations with self-fashioning recall "the elite and narcissistic world of the nineteenth-century dandy, who deliberately rejected the telos of a natural self in favor of a life of contrived artifice, and did so with minimal regard for its impact on others." (21) Many feminist commentators worried about the implicit androcentrism of Foucault's emphasis on the dangers of identity formation and subsequent interest in practices of the self oriented toward self-erasure. Jana Sawicki has argued, for example, that such interest "can all too easily become the basis for repudiating women's struggles to attain a sense of identity not defined by patriarchal interests." (22) Finally, Charles Taylor saw in Foucault's late interest in self-fashioning a disturbing celebration of an "unrestrained, utterly self-related freedom." (23) Ultimately, his critics warn, by aestheticizing ethics and turning inward to the care of the self, Foucault risked endorsing the callous, self-absorbed and potentially violent stance of the "aesthetic modernist," thereby undermining claims for human mutuality, respect, or concern for others.
As compelling as some concerns regarding the normative implications of Foucault's work appear, however, much of the critical discussion of his ethics of self-fashioning seems to me quite wide of the mark. While each of these critics rightly warns of the dangers of a certain highly imperious and narcissistic mode of self-fashioning, a comparison of such a mode with Foucault's aesthetics of existence reveals little resemblance between them. Rather than endorsing the kind of callous, self-absorbed, and self-aggrandizing mode of self-fashioning about which his critics worry, a careful reading of Foucault's writings and comments on the art of the self shows that they call for practices which reveal the contingency and fragility of the self as a product of a web of contingent events and relationships, and promote cautious, piecemeal experimentation with transforming inherited identities, vocabularies, and forms of life whose maintenance and defense inflict gratuitous suffering and cruelty. Rather than promoting callous aestheticism and indifference to others, I suggest, such an art of the contingent self heightens our awareness of the contingencies and differences cross-cutting all identities, thereby helping militate against the indifference, resentment, and cruelty toward others which sometimes flow from aggressive attempts to universalize, glorify, and defend them? In order to see this, however, we need to take a closer look at the model of self-fashioning Foucault proposed.
Foucault's late interest in models of ethical self-fashioning was sparked by, inter alia, his encounter with the care of the self practiced by the ancient Greeks. By the early 1980s, Foucault turned to questions of a personal ethics of existence in response, he said, to the waning of "the idea of a morality as obedience to a code of rules." (25) The Greco-Roman ethics of the care of the self entailed a relation to the self as an object of one's own ethical self-fashioning, and a set of quasi-spiritual exercises through which one worked on oneself in order to fashion or transform oneself into an ethical subject, a work of art or object of beauty, to be admired by others, oneself, or posterity. (26) According to Foucault, it was this ethic of the care of the self which Christianity eventually displaced with the concept of moral behavior as adherence to a universal code of conduct. Prior to the universalization of the Christian code of morality, Foucault argues, ethical behavior was comprised of a series of deliberate, carefully modulated practices in which the individual engaged in order to work on, adjust, moderate, or exhibit certain aspects of the self. Such practices varied from Socrates' philosophical care of his own soul to Stoic exercises such as daily journal-writing. To the extent that the Christian code of universal morality is today in question, Foucault argued, the ethics of the care of the self appears once more on the horizon of possibilities for alternative approaches to ethical conduct; without, we should add, entertaining romantic illusions about the quality of life in antiquity, for women and slaves especially, or expecting that such codes of morality will ever entirely disappear. (27)
Foucault held out as examples of possible contemporary technologies of the self the practices of genealogical inquiry, writing, and sex. For an intellectual in an age of warranted suspicion with respect to received foundations, identities, and universals, the ethic of the care of the self demands that one engage in practices which disturb, render less comfortable, and detach oneself from what one thinks. "What can the ethics of an intellectual be," Foucault insisted, "if not [`detaching yourself from yourself']: to render oneself permanently capable of self-detachment." (2 Intellectual work constitutes a certain care or practice of the self in which one undertakes to think something other than what one has thought before. Foucault ranked genealogical inquiry among the most potent technologies of the self. As a practice of the self, genealogical inquiry helps us to "separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think." (29) Genealogical analyses of history not only destabilize identities, thereby revealing the lack of necessity at the root of things, but produce dissociative effects on the practitioner of genealogy as well. The purpose of genealogical research, "is not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit to its dissipation [...] to make visible all of those discontinuities that cross us." (30) The dissociating and desubjectivizing experience of contingency within oneself erodes the sense of necessity attached to what one is and creates a space for experimentation.
In the 1960s, Foucault had also explored the possibilities of avant garde writing for the transformation and outright effacement of the self, inspired by literary figures like Blanchot, Bataille, Klossowski, and Roussel. (31) For these authors, writing constituted a practice which, with respect to identity and subjectivity, entailed a certain degree of risk. Upon embarking on a new project, the writer ventures to transform not only the thinking of others, but his or her own as well. "Someone who is a writer," Foucault argued, "is not simply doing his work in his books, [...] his major work is, in the end, himself in the process of writing his books." (32) The aesthetics of existence demands that one continuously risk oneself and one's thinking in practices such as writing. Foucault himself was an enthusiast of such literary risk-taking as a practice of the self. "I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face," he declared in The Archaeology of Knowledge; "Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same." (33)
Apart from genealogical research and writing, Foucault also identified sex as a field for practices consistent with the ethics of self-fashioning. In sexual relations Foucault endorsed, inter alia, experimentation with ways of creating new forms of pleasure which heighten and multiply its dissociative and desubjectivizing effects. (34) In his practice of S/M, for example, Foucault experimented with and risked a certain self-effacement. (35) A desire to experiment with identity and non-identity also explains the appeal of anonymous bath-house sex, where "you stop being imprisoned inside your own face, your own past, your own identity," and in which "it's not the assertion of identity that's important; it's the assertion of non-identity." (36) In general, Foucault's queer ethics and politics called not for a celebration of gayness as a code of existence but demanded, rather, the pursuit of "relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation." (37) For those uncomfortable with the implication that they ought to practice S/M in order to constitute themselves as ethical subjects in Foucault's sense of the term, it warrants noting that he did not insist on universalizing his own particular set of practices of the self. Cultivating self-detachment depends primarily on seeking out experiences which remove us from our habitual centers of gravity, thereby revealing the "cultural unconscious" on which our current practices, habits of thought, and limits depend. Any trip away from the self, literally and figuratively speaking, helps cultivate the sense of contingency consistent with Foucault's ethic of the care of the self. Foucault once suggested that foreign travel and immersion in other cultures, for example, might produce effects of self-detachment similar to those he sought through genealogy, writing, and sex. (3
From these examples of Foucault's own attempts to engage in an aesthetics of existence one can see how his ethics of self-fashioning takes the form of a relationship to one's self that is ever cognizant of its fragility and contingency, and in which one seeks one's own self-overcoming. In relation to his work in general, such an ethics of the care of the self follows from an acknowledgement of the contingency of identities and subject positions revealed in his genealogical studies. By revealing the artifice, contingency, and web of relations lying behind every identity, including one's own, Foucault's genealogies weaken the sense of necessity and inevitability attached to what we are, think, and do, thereby opening up a space for experimentation with new identities and social relations. Foucault's contemporary take on the art of the self entails a certain kind of care of the contingent self, one which demands that one engage in practices of the self which both reveal the conditions under which one's identity has been produced and make possible one's self-transformation. Whatever one might make of Foucault's own idiosyncratic approach to self-fashioning, this hardly seems like the strategy of the self-aggrandizing aesthete about which Foucault's critics worry. Critics like Wolin are blind to the distinction because they tend to collapse all possible modes of self-fashioning into one monolithic form of aestheticist self-absorption and cruelty. This is entirely unwarranted. The callous, self-aggrandizing aestheticism which Wolin and others rightly warn us against constitutes only one model of self-fashioning among a range of possibilities, and one that is quite distinct from the model endorsed by Foucault. By examining another model of self-creation, such as that recently expounded by Richard Rorty, we can better dramatize the differences between the models of self-creation which Foucault, on one hand, and his critics, on the other, have in mind.
II. Rorty on Strong Poetry
Foucault's work calls for comparison with Richard Rorty's not least because of the latter's celebration of what he calls, after Harold Bloom, the figure of the "strong poet," embodied in such paradigmatic self-fashioners as Proust, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche. Rorty also shares what he calls Foucault's "ironism," or his sense of the contingency of all that we have inherited as fixed and given in the world, including our language, social practices and institutions, moral vocabulary, and sense of ourselves qua selves. "The ironist," Rorty writes, "is a nominalist and a historicist. She thinks nothing has an intrinsic nature, a real essence." (39) Rorty, too, rejects the notion of human nature, the belief in some "deep self" as a reservoir of characteristics shared by all human beings. We are what the historical, cultural, and social determinations bearing down upon us have made us into. This has become increasingly evident thanks to the work of ironist thinkers like Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and Foucault. According to Rorty, in the wake of this progressive ironization of knowledge, identity, and morality we are faced with two tasks. If we are not to lapse into conformism, or what Rorty calls "the freezing-over of culture," (40) then we must take up the existential task of producing or creating ourselves, that is, of pursuing a form of existence and identity that is as autonomous as possible from the vocabularies, identities, and practices we have inherited. In other words, we must take up the ethic of self-fashioning. On the other hand, Rorty argues, if we are to avoid lapsing into barbaric and cruel forms of social organization and practice, we must attend to the communitarian project of cultivating the sense of affiliation, solidarity, and obligation necessary to bind us to our fellow human beings. Rorty calls this communitarian project the ethic of mutual recognition and accommodation. While we most pay heed to both the urge to autonomy as well as our obligations to others, however, Rorty also sees an irreconcilable tension between the two, as we will see.
According to Rorty, while we all seek to be the "authors" of our own lives to some degree, throughout history some have felt the urgency of the task of self-creation more acutely than others. Such individuals--romantic poets, philosophers, scientific geniuses, and political revolutionaries--are compelled to create whole new vocabularies, metaphors, and forms of life by the urge to disaffiliate from inherited and conventional ways of seeing, saying, and doing things. Rorty calls such figures "strong poets," and sees them as exemplars of the ethic of autonomy and self-fashioning who, in the process of creating themselves as the originators of new ways of seeing, describing, and doing things, furnish the rest of us with new vocabularies, metaphors, and practices by which to understand and create ourselves. (41) According to Rorty, the model of self-creation adopted by the strong poet is informed by a peculiar set of fears and imperatives. The strong poet is racked by what Harold Bloom has called "the anxiety of influence," or the "horror of finding himself to be only a copy or a replica." (42) His is a fear of failing to create anything new in the world, new words, or a new language, and of failing to establish a unique "I" against the "blind impress" of history and the inherited vocabularies and practices of his culture and society. (43) The strong poet's view of personal as well as aesthetic failure consists in accepting someone else's description of the world and himself, and in executing in life "a previously prepared program [...] elegant variations on previously written poems." (44) a result, the strong poet adopts an obsessive mode of self-relation in which he treats himself as an object of aesthetic manipulation. Success in strong poetry is marked by the individual's ability to recognize himself as his own creation, to look back upon what he has become and say "thus I willed it." (45) Rorty affirms the edifying potential of the kind of strong poetry practiced by ironist thinkers like Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, which has the power to radically transform our cultural inheritance by furnishing us with whole new vocabularies and metaphors with which to understand and redescribe ourselves.
The strong poet's model of self-fashioning, however, poses problems in terms of the question of social solidarity and concern for others. Almost inevitably, Rorty concedes, the obsessive nature of the strong poet's struggle to compose a singular "life-poem" lends a callous imperiousness to her relations with others, to the point where the latter come to be perceived as little more than raw material for her own aesthetic self-perfection. (46) In this respect, she is capable of acts of the utmost cruelty. Along with Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, Rorty's gallery of strong poets is filled with a variety of "sensitive killers, cruel aesthetes, and pitiless poets," (47) including such literary creations as Dickens' Skimpole and Nabokov's Humbert Humbert. We shall examine momentarily how Rorty attempts to reconcile the obvious tension between his enthusiasm for the strong poet's ethic of self-creation and his more communitarian concern for cultivating fellow-feeling and avoiding cruelty. First, let us take note of the differences between the model of self-fashioning embodied in the practice of strong poetry and that entailed in Foucault's aesthetics of existence.
While each model treats the subject as the object of its own aesthetic and ethical work, there is a considerable gap between them. This gap is opened up by the imperious, self-transcendentalizing ambition of the strong poet versus the self-reflexive practice of embracing the contingencies of selfhood and working to become something other than what one is at the centre of Foucault's aesthetics of existence. Whereas the strong poet seeks to transcend the "blind impress" of conditions frustrating his or her ambition to create a unique and glorious self, the practitioner of the Foucauldian art of the self engages in practices which reveal the contingency and lack of necessity at the root of the self and its identity, thereby promoting the desubjectivization, destabilization, and even effacement of the self. Whereas the strong poet is motivated by an elitist and romantic urge to disaffiliate altogether from the discourse and practice of his predecessors, the practitioner of the aesthetics of existence traces in meticulous detail his dependence upon them, as a necessary condition of critical detachment from what he has become through them, in the interest of carving out a space in which to invent practices and forms of life free from the pressure to automatically conform with them, and which others might take up as well.
The gap between strong poetry and the aesthetics of existence widens even further when we examine these modes of self-fashioning in relation to the question of ethical responsiveness to others. Insofar as strong poetry harbors an inherent capacity for incuriosity and cruelty in relation to others, as we saw, Rorty recommends that its practice be strictly limited to the edifying activities of the individual in private life, such as reading or writing ironist theory. Nothing in the model of self-fashioning expounded by Foucault, however, explicitly sanctions or underwrites the kind of wanton manipulation and abuse of others to which the strong poet is prone. The double imperative of recognizing oneself as a product of a web of relations and contingent events, and of remaining open to self-transformation, militates against the imperiousness and cruelty inherent in the strong poet's project of self-transcendentalization. The strong poet's drive to consolidate and glorify his identity, even at the expense of others, is incompatible with the kind of ontological awareness of the lack of necessity underlying all identities, including one's own, cultivated by the Foucauldian care of the contingent self. Practices like genealogical criticism which enhance appreciation of our own contingency may well guard against the potential for cruelty inherent in drives to transcendentalize identity or universalize morality. (4 I will take up and expand this argument farther below. For now it seems clear Foucault offers us a model of self-fashioning which, in comparison to strong poetry at least, contains no explicit invitation to the kind of violence and cruelty feared by his critics.
Before presenting the remainder of the case for Foucault's ethics of self-fashioning, however, the differences between the two models of self-fashioning developed here can be underscored by referring to the case of Pierre Riviere, the nineteenth-century French parricide who was the subject of a minor work by Foucault. The case is pertinent for a number of reasons. Firstly, it involves an aesthetically motivated violent crime. Riviere carried out his crime according to the imperatives of a certain project of aesthetic self-fashioning, as we shall see. As such, the case allows us to examine more concretely the relationship between models of self-fashioning and care and concern for others. Secondly, it provides an occasion to challenge the widespread caricature of Foucault as glorifying the violence and cruelty of figures like Riviere. There is no shortage of critics who have suggested that such crimes are more or less consistent with the principles of Foucault's aesthetics of existence. Yet, when Riviere's case is examined in light of the respective models of self-fashioning discussed above, it becomes clear that, far from a model for the aesthetics of existence, Riviere bears much closer resemblance to Rorty's strong poet.
III. Pierre Riviere's Strong Poetry
According to the documents collected and edited by Foucault as, I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother ..., (49) a French peasant, Pierre Riviere, confessed to the murders of his pregnant mother, sister, and younger brother in 1835. During his interrogation, Riviere produced a memoir explaining the facts leading up to, as well as the reasons behind, his crime. The ostensible motive of Riviere's attack was to relieve his father of the burden of his allegedly malicious and vindictive spouse. His sister, Riviere rationalized, was allied to his mother's cause and had therefore to be condemned as well. As for his younger brother, whom he knew to be his father's favorite, Riviere reasoned that by killing him, his father's anger would be brought upon himself, and that thus he would not be mourned by his father after his own inevitable execution. Riviere expected, indeed eagerly anticipated, a speedy execution. Instead, however, his case became the focal point of a conflict between the legal profession and the emerging medical specialty of psychiatry. The debate over Riviere's guilt dragged on for five years before the psychiatric profession finally succeeded in having his sentence commuted to life imprisonment.
The Riviere case is of interest to us here because of its aesthetic dimensions. Firstly, the murders were the culmination of Riviere's lifelong attempt to distinguish himself, or, as he explained in his memoir, "make some noise in the world." (50) By murdering his mother and sister Riviere sought to transform himself into his father's savior. Moreover, by murdering his younger brother, Riviere ensured that, in spite of his sacrifice, he himself would not be mourned. Indeed, by denying himself the satisfaction of being fondly remembered by his father, Riviere's sacrifice is double. And yet, this whole tragic scene and disturbing rationalization emerged out of Riviere's self-creative bid to transcend the banality and frustration of his existence on the margins of French society in one theatrically violent grand gesture. "I thought," he wrote:
that an opportunity had come for me to raise myself, that my name would
make some noise in the world, that by my death I should cover myself with
glory [...], Thus I took my fatal decision. (51)
Riviere's self-creative urge was doubly satisfied by the narrative re-creation of his crime in the justificatory memoir he composed in prison. The same aesthetic compulsion which led him to murder his family demanded the crime's re-enactment, glorification, and immortalization in writing. On the face of it, this tragic scenario appears to confirm the fears of those critical of the ethics of self-fashioning. Just as Foucault's critics warned, an aestheticist ethic of self-creation led Riviere to commit acts of brutality against others whom he was incapable of seeing as anything other than fodder for his own project of aesthetic self-perfection and transcendence. However, while he clearly pursued a program of self-fashioning which led to acts of extreme violence, his program bears little resemblance to Foucault's aesthetics of existence as expounded above. Riviere's case confirms the violent and anti-social tendencies embedded within only one model of self-fashioning. In my view, the model adopted by Riviere is strikingly similar to strong poetry.
Riviere meets many if not all of Rorty's criteria for establishing the credentials of a strong poet. Riviere was clearly afflicted by the strong poet's "anxiety of influence". According to his memoir, Riviere's thoughts were filled with visions of glory and notoriety: "I had ideas of glory, [...] I was consumed by ideas of greatness and immortality, [...] I was always preoccupied with my excellence." (52) He evinced a strong ambition to raise himself above his condition, and harbored a burning desire to invent new things and new words. (53) Of course, his ultimate creations were himself, as the glorious "savior" of his father, and his memoir, a text which, thanks to Foucault, proved to be his most potent weapon for dislodging himself from the margins of history. (54)
No strong poet, Rorty tells us, can resist the compulsion to demonstrate, display and test his or her distinctiveness in writing and in deed. Riviere was no exception. Riviere could not achieve glory as the "savior" of his father without eliminating his mother. Then, facing obscurity in prison, he continued to pursue his project of singularity and transcendence by inventing and redescribing himself in writing. The strong poet, Rorty tells us, defines failure in life as the acceptance of someone else's description of the world and of oneself, which is to live life according to a "poem" one has not composed for oneself. In his prison writings, Riviere vigorously resisted medical descriptions of himself as a "madman" and relished the opportunity to stand before the courts and the public, "to have thoughts opposed to all my judges, to dispute against the whole world." (55)
Finally, Riviere's strong poetry is confirmed by his display of cruelty and indifference to the suffering of those around him. The obsessive strong poet not only fails to notice how her pursuits might be affecting others but opts at times to objectify and instrumentalize others, subsuming them under the personal imperatives of her own project of transcendence. (56) The intensity of Riviere's obsession with covering himself with glory propelled him toward his final decision to kill. Far from viewing his family members as ends in themselves, Riviere objectified and instrumentalized them into mere material for his own aesthetic gratification.
In Riviere's case, then, we see how a combination of the strong poet's anxiety of influence, need to dramatize and transcendentalize his identity, and tendency to view the world in aesthetic terms makes him capable of alarming acts of violence and cruelty. The strong poetry of individuals like Riviere shows us that certain models of self-fashioning can underwrite acts of disturbing violence and cruelty. According to Richard Wolin, such a model of self-fashioning inevitably leads to behavior that is manipulative and predatory:
If I view other persons primarily in aesthetic terms [...] I
philosophically underwrite their wanton manipulation: they become in effect
material for my own personal aesthetic gratification; they are degraded to
the status of bit players in the drama of my own private aesthetic
spectacle. (57)
Be that as it may, the Riviere case fails to confirm the potential for violence and cruelty alleged to inhere in the model of self-fashioning endorsed by Foucault. When critics claim that Foucault's ethics of self-creation underwrites forms of life which are manipulative and predatory, the model of self-fashioning they seem to have in mind has much more in common with that of the strong poet. This seems clear from the following passage from one of Wolin's essays on Foucault:
instead of an ethic of reciprocity or brotherliness, Foucault opts for what
we might call a dramaturgical model of conduct, in which action becomes
meaningful solely qua performative gesture. But this theory risks
sanctioning an approach to ethics that is brazenly particularistic and
elitist. Formally, it remains only a hair's breadth removed from
Nietzsche's rehabilitation of the right of the stronger. (5
When Wolin voices concerns here about the ethical implications of a model of self-fashioning which privileges the criteria of beauty or glory, however, the model he has in mind is strong poetry rather than the aesthetics of existence. As the comparison of the aesthetics of existence and strong poetry above made clear, there is a significant gap between the two models. The model of strong poetry exemplified by Riviere is prone to an insensitive imperiousness and obsessive preoccupation with the self's glorification and transcendentalization. The strong poet strives to leave a lasting, distinctive, and singular mark indicative of the extraordinariness of his identity. It is in precisely the imperiousness and self-transcendentalizing ambition he harbored, however, that Riviere can be said clearly not to have been engaged in the kind of critical and reflexive aesthetics of existence endorsed by Foucault. Contrary to the imperious indifference and transcendental obsessions of the strong poet, the practitioner of the aesthetics of existence is committed to continuous self-detachment and self-overcoming via the care of the contingent self. Foucault's model of self-creation demands the subject's continual scrutiny of and experimentation on itself. Unlike the strong poet's bid for transcendence, which cultivates an identity which is both glorious and terminal, the practitioner of the aesthetics of existence continually explores the contingent relations and events by which she has become what she is, as well as the possibilities for becoming something else. Adherence to Foucault's aesthetics of the self requires that one acknowledge the contingencies, accidents, and web of relations and events that have made one what one has become, and eschew efforts to consolidate and freeze one's identity around some idealized, naturalized, terminal self-sameness. Finally, the cruel indifference of the strong poet is invited by the aestheticization of others as merely contingent artifacts and material. On the other hand, the practitioner of the aesthetics of existence may become so attuned to the contingency and constructedness of the self that any effort to transcendentalize her identity, particularly at the expense of others, would conflict with her ontological awareness of her own contingency and fragility as a subject. The imperious and callous nature by which Riviere pursued his own aesthetic self-fashioning stemmed largely from the ambition he harbored for recognition, glory, and transcendence. In the aesthetics of existence Foucault wagers such tendencies would be weakened, if not altogether neutralized, by the acknowledgement of the contingency and instability of all identities, including one's own.
In the preceding comparison, then, one is hard-pressed to find anything in Foucault's aesthetics of existence that underwrites or sanctions the kind of cruelty and indifference toward others exhibited by figures like Riviere. In my view, the predatory Nietzschean most feared by Foucault's critics is actually Rorty's strong poet. As a result, the concerns of critics like Wolin, Jay, and Megill, among others, seem rather misdirected. There is an interesting irony here. While Rorty's pragmatist defense of American liberal democracy has garnered its share of detractors, including Wolin himself, his celebration of strong poetry has barely been remarked upon. (59) In the final section of this essay, I take up the broader question of the relationship between the ethics of self-fashioning and the communitarian concern for our relationships with others. As we saw above, Rorty suggests that these two concerns embody competing and irreconcilable logics and priorities. I want to suggest, however, that Foucault's work on the aesthetics of existence reveals a way to bridge this alleged gap between self-creation and solidarity.
IV. Care of the Self and Care for Others
The belief that, like strong poetry, Foucault's ethics of the care of the self precludes the possibility of care or concern for others is based on the view that all forms of the ethic of self-fashioning are intrinsically hostile to what Rorty calls the communitarian ethic of mutual recognition and accommodation. Rorty shares with Foucault's non-liberal critics the view that the ethic of self-fashioning is irreconcilable with our duties to others, which explains why his celebration of strong poetry has received much less critical attention. Tied up with the ethic of self-fashioning, Rorty claims, is an inherently elitist and anti-social impulse to disaffiliate from and to disparage the community and its inherited vocabularies and practices. (60) It would be a grave mistake, therefore, to think that by adhering to the ethic of self-fashioning one somehow contributes to communal solidarity or the social good. On the contrary, any attempt to infuse our social relations or public lives with the strong poet's irony and ethic of self-creation in all likelihood would lead to disaster. If the strong poet were to become involved in public life, for example, she would find it almost impossible to resist what Nancy Fraser has called the "Sorelian temptation" to treat the community as mere material for her own aesthetic self perfection, that is, "as an empty canvas awaiting the unfettered designs of the poet-leader." (61) We run the risk of such a Sorelian nightmare, Rorty argues, when we infuse our public lives with the essentially private ethic of self-fashioning.
For his part, Rorty attempts to resolve the obvious tension between his admiration for the strong poet's creative genius and his own acknowledgement of the dangers inherent in her search for autonomy and transcendence by recommending his eminently liberal "partition solution". Given that the practice of strong poetry is noxious to intersubjective relations and irrelevant, at best, to our public lives, Rorty recommends that it be confined to our private lives, to our relations with ourselves. (62) In our public discourses, meanwhile, we should strive to cultivate the communitarian ethic of mutual recognition and accommodation by adopting an "ethnocentric" attachment to discourses and practices promoting freedom, tolerance, and the avoidance of cruelty. The only way that Rorty sees, then, to preserve the equally worthy goals of self-creation and solidarity is to consign their pursuit to what he sees as the two separate and hermetically sealed spheres of private and public life.
Rorty's attempt to privatize self-creation is important for our purposes because it not only throws into relief a key source of disagreement with Foucault, but also signals a break from those critics of Foucault with whom Rorty has thus far been allied. Not surprisingly, Fraser, Wolin, and McCarthy have chastised Rorty for relying on the widely discredited liberal distinction between public and private. (63) These latter arguments take us to the heart of Foucault's disagreement with Rorty, and make for some interesting bedfellows as well. Thus far, Rorty has been allied with Foucault's critics on the question of the tendencies toward cruelty allegedly inherent in the ethic of self-creation. Rorty, however, tries to preserve the edifying effects of self-creation by erecting a wall between the private pursuit of self-creation and the public pursuit of mutual care and concern, a wall which thinkers like Fraser argue cannot be maintained. In other words, while they differ with Foucault on the question of the relationship between self-creation and cruelty, many of his leftist critics implicitly agree with him, contra Rorty, on the permeability of the boundary between the public and private, that is, on the inescapable connection between the kind of relationship we have with our selves and our relations with others. For thinkers like Fraser, McCarthy, and Wolin, the effects of self-creation will inevitably spill over into intersubjective and public life, albeit for the worse. This leads us to the final argument that I want to examine here. It was Foucault's contention that there is an inevitable connection between the relationship we have with ourselves and the relations we have with others, and that the mode of self-relation at the heart of the aesthetics of existence bridges the gap alleged to exist between self-creation and solidarity. Let us examine this contention in more detail.
In his writings on ethics, first of all, Foucault called attention to the relationship between the ethics of self-fashioning and care and concern for others by returning to the Ancients. For the ancient Greeks, the care of the self and care for others were intertwined; the former, which most often took the form of self-mastery, constituted an important prelude to the fulfillment of one's role as husband, father, mentor, lover, friend, master, and ruler, in which one engaged in the care of others. In The Use of Pleasure Foucault recalls Socrates' instruction to Alcibiades that the care of the self was "a precondition that had to met before one was qualified to attend to the affairs of others or lead them." (64) While Socrates admonished his fellow citizens to tend to themselves before they attend to the affairs of the city, this is by no means an invitation to neglect the latter. The care of the self is not only not incompatible with living in the city but, as Alexander Nehamas has recently argued, "will ultimately make both citizens and the city as a whole better." (65) Foucault also shows, in both The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, how various Stoic exercises and spirituals were related to the practitioner's social relations and public functions. Turning to the contemporary practice of the care of the self, Foucault was drawn to practices suggesting relationships between the care of the self and care for others similar to those evident in antiquity. Foucault's comments on sexual pleasure oscillate between enthusiasm for the dissociative and desubjectivizing effects of certain practices and interest in the production of identities, novel relationships, and affective ties which stem from them. Many of the practices endorsed by Foucault were intended to weaken and destabilize the experience of self and identity as something fixed, necessary, and transcendent, to show that our present experience of ourselves "is far from filling all possible spaces." (66) On the other hand, inventiveness in the field of sexuality a
作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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zt: Richard Rorty 一位真正的自由主义者
