For the last week or so, I have been intrigued by Michel Foucault’s concept; “Care of the Self.” I am still exploring it in his writings. What intrigues me most is the phrase itself, set in the context of the care of oneself being the center of one’s ethical universe. It is easy to take a number of misinterpretations of that sentence. One may, for example, interpret it as permitting a psychopathic world-view in which everything is subject to my desires. That is not the interpretation that interests me, for the term is “care of the self” and not merely “self.” To me the word “care” denotes ideas of health and well-being. And I choose to understand “health” holistically, informed perhaps by a certain Asian perspective, as the existence of harmony between mind, body and environment. The word “care” also denotes for me the idea of cultivation, and that in turn the image of a gardener, engaged in a deliberate exercise of encouraging and facilitating ever more compounding levels of growth. Together these two concepts, health and cultivation, counter the claim that positioning “care of self” at the center of one’s ethics is a type of psychosis or egoism. The egoistic self, and obviously the psychotic self, is neither harmonious, nor healthy, nor cultivated. It is best described in the Buddhist tradition as a “hungry ghost.” Rather, the concept of “care of the self” is attractive because it is a philosophical anchor rooted in the subjective, which is all we have for meaning, rather than in the illusionary “objective” dialectic of our time.

Nietzsche’s aphorism that God is Dead is now so passé, so affected, that it is in great danger of soon appearing, in ironic reincarnation, on the front of a hipster t-shirt. And yet the death of the objective haunts our lives. For over 50 years, there has been a social dialogue within Western society, essentially between hip and square. This emerged explicitly in the 1960s and yielded much fruit that we enjoy today. But by the late 1970s, the avant-garde of this counter-culture became so associated with dissipation, mere critique, and a lack of sustainability, that reactionary movements dominated the 1980s in both the US under Reagan, and the UK under Thatcher. These movements too fizzled out into dissipation and bust. The mainstreaming of the internet in the late 90s, and the economic boom that it sponsored, suggested a new objective meta-narrative, a third-way, that promised to take the social liberalism of the 1960s and combine it with the economic dynamism of the 1980s. The “BoBo,” the bohemian-bourgeois, the “creative class,” was born; sandals and sushi on the other side of history. Bo-Bo died on September 11, 2001. During the Bush years that followed, America metastized. The military-industrial-complex exploded in size and influence. Imperial foreign-wars were cynically and shamelessly prosecuted for the exclusive benefit of corporate interests. All dissent was crushed as “Un-American” and fear was sown broadcast. By the end of the Bush era, the reality of America had become so foreign to Americans, that they crossed a line hitherto unimaginable, and elected their first African-American president.

Barack Obama was the great American hope. Confident, intelligent, articulate, of mixed heritage, he symbolized for many the quintessential essence of America. For liberals he was the long-awaited Messiah, the child of their summer of love toughened by the Spartan winter of the Reagan years. For independents, he was not the establishment that had run the country into two pointless, expensive and seemingly endless wars. Only a dyed-in-the-wool curmudgeon can deny the scale of the multilayered and sincere joy that coursed through the United States upon his election. But the financial-crisis, the bailout, and the subsequent unnamed-depression provided the perfect opportunity for reactionary forces, with their ideological roots in the Reagan years, their sense of entitlement in the Bush years, to fight back. There followed a series of obscenities in the public square. The US Supreme Court controversially awarded to corporations the opportunity to contribute to their political puppets without limit. The Fox News network descended into a level of discourse that passed race-baiting and irrationality with aplomb. Extreme right-wing political groups largely financed by the Koch Brothers and their fellow travellers, launched a volley of shock-doctrine tactics at both the state and federal levels. Political-hack organizations, such as Americans for Prosperity, were commissioned to astro-turf political agitation and purchase Congress for corporate interests in the midterm elections. And they succeeded. Even to those of us who continue to support Obama, it has become clear that his power, our power in this context, is fettered. It defies logic to continue to believe that we live in a functional representative democracy, when a minority that has brought us to financial ruin, should go unpunished, should in fact be richly and personally rewarded, as millions of their powerless victims face long-term unemployment and eviction. These obscenities have ripped the moral fabric of our society apart. The curtain in the temple of our democracy has been torn.

My own reaction to this reality has been tortured. On the one hand there is the natural reaction to want to wash one’s hands of the whole thing, to pursue a life of cultivated and intentional ignorance of the politics of distraction, the misleading and time-wasting hysterics of political theatre. Countering this reaction is the feeling that to live that way is to be anesthetized to one’s own time, in a way that has a faint hint of cowardice about it. On the other hand, there is the notion of becoming a partisan, to realize that history is dialectic, that politics has a huge impact on the lives of others, and one must be involved in that dialogue, to try and bend it toward justice. Countering this reaction is a vision of impotence, of one descending into caricature, of a life wasted. The attraction of the idea of “care of the self” in this context is it’s apparent non-dialectic quality, the suggestion, that it is a meditation on the age-old question of happiness and as such exists outside of our immediate political discourse and even our Abrahamic civilization. This initial perception may prove false; Foucault’s scattershot historical references do make one worry about the contents of the package. But the idea, that happiness is cultivated through care, rather than anchored in the pursuit of meaning, is a subtle difference in my mind that I find useful and that I think puts Foucault beyond Camus. To send man out into a bankrupt subjective world in pursuit of meaning, even subjective meaning, is to send him to oblivion. But to teach him how to cultivate his own happiness, through day-by-day actions, seems a practical instruction, in accordance with the actual humility of man’s momentary existence. It positions man in the center of his own short life and cuts the shackles that tie his happiness to delusional dialogues and distractions that in the end merely expropriate his frustrations.