The Aesthetic and Ascetic Dimensions of an Ethics of Self-fashioning: Nietzsche and Foucault

Both Nietzsche, as the nineteenth century wound down, and Foucault in the last third of the twentieth century, responded to, and sought a way out of, a profound cultural crisis. Nietzsche first signaled the eruption of that crisis with his proclamation of the death of God,1 and eighty years later Foucault confronted the deepening impact of that same crisis. For Nietzsche, the death of God, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, was the event “that tears history apart,”2 that shattered the very bases upon which morality, values, knowledge, truth, the very meaning of what it was to be human, and socio-political life, in the West had been based for nearly two thousand years. The outcome of the cultural crisis inaugurated by the death of God might be an historical period during which humankind establishes new gods – science, technology, race or nation -to worship, new foundations upon which to slake its thirst for metaphysical certitude. However, that crisis might also open up the space for humankind to experiment with new and daring modes of existence, fresh ways of being. Both Nietzsche and Foucault were well aware of the dangers to which this cultural crisis exposed humankind, even as they both responded to it by articulating an ethics and aesthetics of self-fashioning. For Nietzsche, nothing less than a transfiguration of human being was at stake, while Foucault, especially through the introduction of a new concept, subjectivation, at the very end of his life, a concept that has so far received little attention, has provided us with the means that will enhance our understanding of how an ethics of self-fashioning can be a powerful response to the cultural crisis through which we are now living. Inasmuch as that cultural crisis was the point of departure for such an ethics, let us first indicate the contours of the crisis to which these two thinkers so vigorously reacted, before we turn to the manifold dimensions of their response to it.