Abstract
Foucault begins by asking ‘In what historical form do the relations between the ‘subject’ and ‘truth,’ … take shape in the West?’ (p. 2). He responds to his own question by suggesting there is a distinction between a ‘philosophical analytics of truth in general’—a ‘formal ontology of truth’—which poses the question of the conditions under which true knowledge is possible that creates a ‘historical ontology of ourselves,’ or in other words, the complex ways we have constituted ourselves as subjects of knowledge and truth.
My problem is the relation of self to self and of telling the truth. … My own problem has always been the question of truth, of telling the truth, the wahr-sagen—what it is to tell the truth—and the relation between ‘telling the truth’ and forms of reflexivity, of self upon self.
Michael Foucault, (1988a) Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. A. Sheridan et al. New York: Routledge: 32–3.
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Notes
- 1.
For Foucault’s Greek and Latin sources (taken from the French) see the Translator’s Notes pp. xxxi-xli.
- 2.
The translation is based on Stuart Eldon’s review of Foucault’s book at https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/review-foucaults-confessions-flesh/.
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Peters, M.A. (2021). Subjectivity, Truth and the Historical Ontology of Ourselves: The Hermeneutics of the Self-Foucault’s Lectures at the College de France, 1981–82. In: Peters, M.A., Besley, T., Zhang, H. (eds) Moral Education and the Ethics of Self-Cultivation. East-West Dialogues in Educational Philosophy and Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8027-3_17
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