Summary
The care of the self (epimeleia heautou in Greek, cura sui in Latin) was a philosophical and cultural practice that emerged in the first and second centuries CE as a central feature of Greco-Roman ethical life. As analyzed by Michel Foucault in the third volume of The History of Sexuality (1984), the care of the self involved a set of techniques for monitoring, examining, and governing oneself: nightly self-examination, screening of impressions, dietary management, physical regimen, and philosophical correspondence. Far from being a solitary or narcissistic retreat, this practice was embedded in social relationships and borrowed extensively from the language and methods of medicine. For the history of medicine, the concept matters because it reveals a period when the distinction between philosophical ethics and medical practice barely existed: to care for the soul and to care for the body were understood as aspects of a single discipline.
The Concept
Epimeleia heautou / cura sui emerged in the first and second centuries CE as a central philosophical and cultural practice, crossing diverse schools (Stoic, Epicurean, and Platonic) and involving techniques for monitoring, examining, and governing oneself (Foucault, Michel, 1986). Foucault’s central argument is that the increased sexual austerity observed in this period does not represent a strengthening of prohibitions but an intensification of the relation to the self: the self becomes the primary site of ethical work, and restraint in pleasure is a consequence of this new preoccupation with one’s own constitution rather than a set of externally imposed rules (Foucault, Michel, 1986).
Foucault identifies in the first and second centuries CE an original “stylistics of existence,” a distinctive ethical style that differs from both the classical polis ethics and the later Christian moral code (Foucault, Michel, 1986). This stylistics centers on the self’s relation to itself as the primary ethical reference (Foucault, Michel, 1986).
One common misreading treats the care of the self as a form of self-absorption. Foucault takes care to correct this. The ancient practice is goal-directed toward a well-constituted self capable of governing itself and relating to others, not a withdrawal into self-absorption.
Self-Care as Social Practice
The care of the self was not a solitary or purely interior practice but a social one. It was cultivated within relationships (with a guide, a friend, a community), required interlocutors, and took place through shared exercises and correspondence (Foucault, Michel, 1986). The cultivation of the self occurred within concrete social changes: transformations in the marital bond and the political game provide the context within which the new stylistics of existence develops (Foucault, Michel, 1986). The relation to others (spouse, political community, students, friends) was not abandoned but reorganized around the principle that one governs others only from the position of having first governed oneself (Foucault, Michel, 1986).
Techniques of Self-Examination
Two complementary techniques of self-examination illustrate the practice:
Seneca’s nightly review. Seneca describes a practice of nightly self-examination in which he reviews each action and thought of the day, asking himself where he fell short and what he might have done better (Foucault, Michel, 1986).
Epictetus’s screening of representations. Epictetus, in the Discourses, develops the practice of screening one’s representations (phantasiai) — pausing to examine each impression or impulse before assenting to it. This is a form of self-examination oriented toward the present moment rather than retrospective review (Foucault, Michel, 1986).
These two techniques are not identical. Seneca looks backward, tabulating the day’s events. Epictetus attends to what is happening now, intervening at the moment of perception before the impulse has time to form. Together they illustrate how the care of the self operated across time: in the slow accumulation of habitual self-review and in the immediate, moment-to-moment governance of one’s mental life.
Askesis: Exercises of the Self
The cultivation of the self was not only a matter of examination but of active formation. Askesis in this tradition is not primarily mortification or deprivation but a set of exercises (spiritual, physical, intellectual) through which the individual forms and strengthens the self, acquiring the habits and dispositions that constitute a durable ethical character (Foucault, Michel, 1986). The aim is gaudium (Stoic: the joy that derives from self-mastery and a good relation to oneself) rather than voluptas (pleasure derived from external objects): self-possession becomes its own reward (Foucault, Michel, 1986).
The cultivation of the self also involves testing procedures (deliberate exposure to difficulty, deprivation, or temptation) as a means of verifying and strengthening one’s self-mastery (Foucault, Michel, 1986). Testing is a criterion of genuine progress (Foucault, Michel, 1986).
The reorientation this requires is what Foucault calls epistrophe eis heauton (conversion to the self) (Foucault, Michel, 1986). It is not a rejection of the world but a reorganization of attention: oneself becomes the primary object of care, the point from which all other activities are governed (Foucault, Michel, 1986).
The Political Context: A Crisis of Subjectivation
Understanding why self-care intensified in the first and second centuries CE requires attention to the political situation. The decline of classical city-states and the absorption of civic life into the imperial structure unsettled the traditional forms through which individuals had constituted themselves as subjects: civic participation, public oratory, and military service. Foucault identifies this as a “crisis of subjectivation”: when the established channels of self-constitution are no longer reliably available, new modes must be found (Foucault, Michel, 1986). The care of the self was one response: an internalized site of ethical formation that could survive the transformation of public life.
This intensification of self-governance also extended into political ethics. The virtue of the good ruler in this period is increasingly defined by self-mastery: legitimate authority over others flows from and is modeled on one’s mastery over one’s own desires and passions (Foucault, Michel, 1986).
Medicine and the Care of the Self
There is a close correlation between the care of the self and medicine in this period. The concept of pathos (passion, suffering, disease) applies to both soul and body, and the philosopher-physician analogy is explicit in figures like Epictetus. Care of the self borrows the language and practices of medical self-management (Foucault, Michel, 1986).
In the Flavian and Antonine periods (late first and second centuries CE), medicine achieved high cultural status: it was a topic of educated discourse, a framework for understanding oneself, and a domain in which the cultivated person was expected to have some competence (Foucault, Michel, 1986). Medical regimen in this period was no longer only a therapeutic intervention for the sick but a comprehensive way of living, governing diet, exercise, sleep, sexual activity, and emotional management as part of an ongoing preventive and self-optimizing practice for healthy individuals (Foucault, Michel, 1986).
Athenaeus of Attalia, a Pneumatist physician of the first century CE, exemplifies the ideal of the medically self-governing individual: the educated person should be capable of governing his own regimen without constant recourse to a physician (Foucault, Michel, 1986). The medical regimen also extended to a detailed dietetics of the environment: attention to seasons, climate, air quality, geographical location, and time of day, and their effects on the body’s constitution and the appropriate management of pleasures (Foucault, Michel, 1986).
This attention to body and health was not hypochondria. Managing the body became a domain of ethical self-formation, and medical knowledge a resource for the cultivation of the self (Foucault, Michel, 1986).
Galen and the Medical Regimen of Pleasures
Galen’s account of sexual activity operates on three planes simultaneously: the cosmological (sexuality serves the demiurge’s plan for reproduction and the continuation of species), the physiological (sexuality is a function of the body’s humoral and pneumatic economy), and the pathological (sexual excess or deficiency produces specific disease states) (Foucault, Michel, 1986). Despite the dangers he identifies, Galen does not prohibit sexual activity but prescribes its regimen: the appropriate management of aphrodisia according to age, constitution, season, and other variables. Medical discourse is regulatory rather than prohibitive (Foucault, Michel, 1986). The sexual demiurge instills desire not as a disturbing irruption but as a function of cosmic order (Foucault, Michel, 1986).
Rufus of Ephesus adds a specifically care-of-self-oriented dimension: those who engage in sexual activity rather than abstaining must take special care of themselves through regimen, diet, exercise, and rest to compensate for the vital expenditure involved. Sexual activity intensifies rather than replaces the need for self-care (Foucault, Michel, 1986).
The ancient regimen of pleasures is concessive rather than normative: it does not specify a universally binding rule of conduct but yields to individual circumstances, granting what is necessary while counseling restraint. Regimen is an art of the possible adapted to the particular case (Foucault, Michel, 1986). Foucault identifies four main variables governing it: procreative purpose, the age of the individual, kairos (the right moment, seasonal and daily timing), and individual temperament and constitution (Foucault, Michel, 1986). What is appropriate for a hot and vigorous youth differs from what is appropriate for an older, more phlegmatic individual; regimen is individualized, not universal (Foucault, Michel, 1986). Taken together, the regimen of pleasures is not a passive submission to medical authority but an active practice of self-governance: the individual learns to read his own constitution, to calculate appropriate timing and degree, and to manage his pleasures as part of a broader art of existence (Foucault, Michel, 1986).
Ancient Self-Examination versus the Hermeneutics of Desire
A structural point that Foucault’s analysis drives home: the ancient care of the self in relation to the body attends to the conditions under which sexual activity is practiced (timing, quantity, circumstance, constitution) rather than to the interpretation of desires themselves. There is no ancient hermeneutics of desire comparable to the later Christian or modern psychoanalytic scrutiny of the interior.
This matters for understanding what the ancient techniques of self-examination were actually doing. The nightly review, the screening of representations, the monitoring of bodily states: these are practices of self-knowledge and self-mastery aimed at governing conduct, not at deciphering desire as a site of hidden sinfulness. While certain practices of self-examination, restraint, and attention to desire are shared between ancient and Christian ethics, the fundamental mode of ethical subjectivation differs: ancient care of the self aims at self-mastery and self-possession, not at the decipherment and mortification of desire as evil. The formal similarity of some practices masks a structural divergence in their meaning and goal.
Aesthetics of Existence
Foucault describes the art of living that underlies these practices as an aesthetics of existence: it is not a code of rules but an aesthetic practice through which one gives form to one’s life (Foucault, Michel, 1986). The self is a material to be worked, a life to be shaped. The ancient ethics of self-governance belongs to this aesthetic register: not a compliance with commandments but a crafting of oneself into a well-formed subject capable of good governance of its own impulses and of its relations with others.
The final, synthesizing characterization of the ancient care of the self is that it constitutes a positive practice of freedom: not a negative morality of prohibition and renunciation but an affirmative art through which the individual actively constitutes himself as a free, self-governing subject capable of good relations with others. The sexual austerity of early imperial philosophy is thus not a precursor to Christian ethics but the development of an art of existence centered on self-preoccupation, in which what changes is not the severity of prohibitions but the mode of the relation to the self (Foucault, Michel, 1986).
See Also
- Michel Foucault
- Galen
- Seneca
- Stoicism
- Regimen
- Dietetics
- Medicalization
- Philosophy of Medicine
- Physician-Patient Relationship
Sources
- Foucault, M. (1986). The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self. Trans. Robert Hurley. Vintage. [foucault-careofself-1986]