PHILOSOPHY AS A SPIRITUAL EXERCISE IN FOUCAULT AND

DELEUZE
I began studying philosophy, like many of you, because I wanted to answer some big questions that haunted
me. In my case, the most important of those questions were whether there was a God and, relatedly, what the
point of my being alive was. Ultimately, these questions converged on the further and motivating question of
how it was that I should go about living. There were other questions as well, I’m sure; but my studiously
fallible memory puts those three forward as the most nagging questions of what we might call my
philosophical adolescence. But, as in all things, adolescence gave way to adulthood. At some point in my
graduate school education I began to develop different motivations for my involvement in philosophy. It’s
not that the big questions (different ones by that time, to be sure, but big nonetheless) – it’s not that the big
questions just went away. Instead, they moved into the background, their urgency replaced by the urgency of
more mature philosophical concerns: getting articles accepted for publication, receiving tenure, making an
academic name for myself. Now, however, the wheel has turned again. In some ways, it has turned back,
although, as Hegel would be quick to point out, when the wheel turns back it never arrives at exactly the
same spot. This turning back has had many causes, but perhaps the most important cause is this. I have
arrived at an age where the far shore of my life is one that I can see as clearly as – or perhaps more clearly
than – the shore from which I set out. I know, more viscerally than I have known before, that sooner or later
I will arrive at that far shore, and that when I do the journals that I have published in and the quotations
that I can cite and the philosophical movers and shakers that I have succeeded in impressing my name upon
will not mean much to me. It is only the big questions, and the answers that I am able to give to those
questions that will matter. And those big questions are, as they have always been, questions about how I am
to lead my life. In returning to those big questions, I have also come to value something that meant less to me
several years ago: simplicity. The discoveries of advanced philosophical theory can be complex, interesting,
and at times quite beautiful in their Byzantine structure. But philosophical lessons for living have to be
simpler. In finding our way through this life, the signposts that philosophy offers us for our desires and our
behavior must, like highway signs, be easy to understand and capable of being followed. This does not mean
that there can’t be profound intellectual depth or complexity behind the signposts. But life, we all discover
sooner or later, is difficult enough; and philosophy, if it is to help us navigate through life, must be made
available to us in ways that we can comprehend and incorporate. What I would like to do today, then, is not
going to be very complex or very difficult. I would like to propose a reading, or better, a broad sketch of a
reading, of the philosophers Foucault and Deleuze. That reading will see them as engaged in what the
historian of ancient philosophy Pierre Hadot has called “spiritual exercises.” As I will point out, the spiritual
exercises that Foucault and Deleuze engage in are importantly different from those to which Hadot calls our
attention, for instance the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Also, as we will see, there are important
differences between the spiritual exercises of Foucault and Deleuze, although in the end I believe they arrive
in very similar places. However, what the writings of Foucault and Deleuze share with many Greek and
Roman thinkers of an earlier era – specifically, the status of their writings as spiritual exercises – is perhaps
of more significance than the differences among the exercises themselves. In both cases, the philosophers
sought to discover, and often merely to remind themselves, of pathways that could be taken for living,
pathways that would lend some significance, some meaningfulness, to a person’s life. And perhaps there is
little more that one can ask of a philosopher – or that a philosopher can ask of himself or herself – than to
have carved out a path that will allow one to lead one’s life and, ultimately, to face one’s death with a bit
more than resignation or despair. Let me start, then, by saying a little bit about Hadot’s idea of a spiritual
exercise, and then see how a reading of Foucault’s work and then Deleuze’s would look if we saw them as
spiritual exercises. I should emphasize that, especially in Foucault’s case, such a reading is not new. In his
recent book The Art of Living, Alexander Nehamas sees Foucault as engaged in a literary project of tracing
an approach to life. Some of the biographies of Foucault – James Miller’s in particular – have emphasized
connections between Foucault’s writings and his life. And Foucault himself often seems to treat his own work
– particularly his later work – this way. Although the reading of Deleuze in terms of spiritual exercises is
discussed less, there are many places in his work where he, too, invites such a reading. The point of this
paper, then, like the point of many of the ancient spiritual exercises, is not so much to pretend to originality,
as to remind us of some of the important truths that are too easily lost along the way. In discussing spiritual
exercises, Hadot has this to say: Spiritual exercises can be best observed in the context of Hellenistic and
Roman schools of philosophy. The Stoics, for instance, declared explicitly that philosophy, for them, was an
“exercise.” In their view, philosophy did not consist in teaching an abstract theory … but rather in the art of
living. It is a concrete attitude and determinate life-style, which engages the whole of existence. The
philosophical act is not situated merely on the cognitive level, but on that of the self and of being.1 Doing
philosophy as a spiritual exercise, then, is doing philosophy with an eye to how one ought to live rather than
with an eye to what will simply be intellectually convincing or stimulating. It is an operation on who one is
and what one does, not merely on how one thinks about things. Now, of course, the question comes
immediately to mind of who the one is that is being addressed. Is it the philosopher, the one who writes or
professes the philosophy; is it the listener, who is often the object of the philosophical discourse; or is it
perhaps both? As Hadot notes, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations were written solely for his own use. The point
of writing them was to ensure for himself on a daily basis that he kept the lessons of the Stoics, and in
particular of Epictetus, before his mind. Most of Foucault’s and Deleuze’s writings, since they were written
for publication, are addressed at least in part to a wider audience. When I turn momentarily to a discussion
of their works, I will suggest that the later writings of Foucault and most of Deleuze’s works were written as
spiritual exercises both for them and for their intended audiences. But it is worth keeping in mind that in
thinking of philosophy as a transformative spiritual exercise, we should not assume that it is an exercise just
for someone other than the writer. Philosophy as a spiritual exercise need not have the same relationship
with readers that personal trainers have with their trainees, in which the training period is solely for the
physical benefit of the trainee. In fact, it may be that when the philosophy is done for the sake of the
philosopher as much as it is for his or her audience that some of the deepest and most interesting philosophy
gets done. After all, when one is writing or speaking in areas where oneself is at stake, there can be a passion
and a commitment that may be lacking when the writing is solely for the edification of others, not to mention
those cases – undoubtedly the most numerous – in which the writing is an academic exercise rather than a
spiritual one. But now, with at least a preliminary idea of philosophy as a spiritual exercise in hand, let me
spend a few moments on Foucault’s thought and suggest that generally, and particularly in the later works,
we should read him as a philosopher engaged in spiritual exercises. Probably the best source for this
suggestion is Foucault himself. Many of you are familiar with the beautiful passage early in the second
volume of his history of sexuality, where he says, As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope
that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient. It was curiosity – the only kind of curiosity, in any case,
that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is
proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value
of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way
or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself?2 In this passage, Foucault
contrasts two kinds of knowledge: the knowledge that is proper for one to have, and the knowledge that
helps one get free of oneself. The first kind of knowledge is, of course, the knowledge he has long criticized in
many of its forms. It’s the knowledge that tells you who you are, what your proper role is, to whom you
should listen, whom you should ignore, and, undergirding all this, why it is the natural order of things to be
exactly as they are rather than another way. The other kind of knowledge is the knowledge that frees us from
the first kind. The second kind of knowledge can operate in several ways. One way is to display the first kind
of knowledge as a contingent formation that is not the natural order of things but instead part of a passing
structure. In Foucault’s archaeological works, he focused on that aspect of the knowledge that it is proper
for one to have. Another way this second kind of knowledge can free us is by showing that who we are told
that we are is not so much the product of disinterested inquiry into our nature but instead the result of social
practices that have their own power arrangements. This other way, which is not exclusive of the first way (in
fact they share the commitment to historicizing what may seem to be eternal verities), was the focus of
Foucault’s genealogical works. Yet another way would be to display other kinds of knowledges and their
engagement with other forms of living, so that some of our own kinds of knowledges and forms of living can
loosen their grip on us. In the last two volumes of his history of sexuality, often considered his ethical works,
this seemed to be Foucault’s approach. Turning to the three published volumes of the history of sexuality,
these works seem very much in the tradition of spiritual exercises. It seems clear here that Foucault is trying
to open a space for sexual expression and experimentation that our legacy of turning sex into sexuality and
sexuality into personal identity has, for some centuries, closed off to us. And in these volumes, particularly
the last two, he writes in a more personal, less academic tone, than in his previous works. I like to think, and
the quote I cited a couple of pages back offers evidence for this, that the point of these volumes is not merely
to weaken the hold our sexual inheritance has upon us – Foucault’s readers – but to weaken its hold on
Foucault himself. In other words, the history of sexuality, and to some extent Discipline and Punish, seem to
me to be works whose force is not merely to teach us about how power and knowledge can constrain us in
deleterious ways, but to teach Foucault the same thing, and thus to offer him – as well as us – possibilities for
living that neither we nor he had previously seen. As I say this, many of you will be thinking of the
biographical details of Foucault’s life, and in particular of Foucault’s homosexuality and his sexual
experimentation. While these detailsmight be relevant in a marginal way to the case I’m trying to make, I
don’t want to see them as centrally important to the understanding of Foucault’s writings as spiritual
exercises. Here’s why. While it may be true that spiritual exercises are a form of personal therapy, not all
forms of personal therapy are spiritual exercises. What distinguishes spiritual exercises from other forms of
personal therapy is that spiritual exercises rely on the importance of larger truths, truths that are accessible
to many people, and perhaps – as in the cases of Aurelius’ Meditations – to people many generations later. I
don’t want to say that spiritual exercises speak to our common humanity, since Foucault, as much as
anybody, worked tirelessly to call into question the idea of a common humanity. But spiritual exercises do
address and utilize truths that are important to many of us, and perhaps might be said to address, if not our
common humanity, our common situation. Having said this much, let me spend a moment considering a
difficulty that might seem to beset the view I’m trying to develop. At the outset, I said that simplicity is a
virtue in philosophical approaches to how we ought to live. This would seem to imply that spiritual exercises
should have at least some measure of simplicity. But Foucault’s works, even at their most accessible, are
hardly simple. How can it be that we take his works as spiritual exercises, as offering lessons in what Hadot
calls “the art of living,” an art which involves “a concrete attitude and a determinate life-style,” when they
are constructed at such a level of complexity? After all, in Foucault’s writings we are hardly faced with the
straightforward reminders that Aurelius offers himself, repeated in many different ways but clinging to the
same central truths. Instead, we are offered intertwined histories that trace subtle and complex changes that
give rise to the present we find ourselves in. The answer to this objection seems to me to be twofold. First, let
me grant the complexity of Foucault’s analyses, and defend that complexity on the basis of something
Foucault was one of the first people to see. Remember that spiritual exercises are performed because they
need to be performed. If our daily world offered us the truths that would help us in our living, spiritual
exercises would be unnecessary. Any philosophy whose goal is to help us live better impresses its lessons
upon us because those lessons do not seem immediately available. Our everyday world leads us astray from
truths that are important for our living; philosophy as a spiritual exercise either discovers or creates or
reminds us of those truths. This is just as much the case for Foucault as it is for the Stoics or the Epicureans.
However, what Foucault recognized was that the power keeping us from those truths is far more insidiously
ingrained within our practices than people before him had understood. Specifically, Foucault recognized
both that power is creative, not merely repressive; and that it occurs at the level of our daily practices, not
merely at the level of large institutions. Given these two related and previously neglected characteristics of
power, the project of understanding the social forces that make us what we are and that keep us from
becoming what we might be is a much more detailed and subtle affair than theorists before Foucault had
realized. That project requires, among other things, nuanced histories of the various practices that are
current in a society, the interactions that have made them what they are, and the effects they give rise to. But
if understanding the forces that keep us from being what we might be is that complicated, doesn’t that show
us that philosophy as a spiritual exercise is hopeless? After all, if philosophy as a spiritual exercise is to
answer to the search for a meaningful life, and if that search requires at least a certain degree of simplicity in
philosophical formulations, and if the obstacles to that search resist such simplicity, doesn’t it become
impossible to engage in philosophy as a spiritual exercise? I believe that, even if we take a Foucauldian
approach, philosophy as a spiritual exercise remains an open avenue for us, in fact an inviting one. To see
why, let me turn to my second response to the idea that Foucault’s writings are too complex to be taken as
spiritual exercises. While the specific analyses Foucault engages in are surely complex, many of the lessons he
wishes us to draw from them and that he would like to draw from them himself are far more
straightforward. In fact, Foucault lists a number of them, not in reference to his own writings, but in
reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Many of you are familiar with Foucault’s preface to that
Anti-Oedipus, a work which is itself no slouch when it comes to complexity. But the lessons Foucault thinks
we should draw from it are very much the lessons we may draw from Foucault’s own work. These lessons,
which Foucault places under the heading “Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life” (drawing, I should note in
passing, on Saint Francis de Sales’ Introduction to the Devout Life, a Catholic spiritual exercise), include
such advice as the following: – Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit,
castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to
reality; – Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth … Use political practice as an intensifier
of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action; – Do
not think one has to be sad in order to be militant; – Do not become enamoured of power.3 These
injunctions, while requiring a bit of background understanding, do not oblige us to memorize entire histories
in order to provide guidance. What Foucault offers in this preface, and what I believe his histories are
designed to reinforce both for him and for us, are lessons in how to free ourselves from reigning orthodoxies
that prevent us from living in ways that we might find meaningful, and, although more tentatively,
suggestions for a meaningful life. Why, then, do we read the histories? Or better, is there any reason to read
them more than once, to return to them after we have recognized the broad lessons they offer? I believe there
is. Of course many of us do return, again and again, to Foucault’s histories. We do it in order to offer
interpretations of what he is saying, or to relate those interpretations to other philosophers, or to criticize or
defend what he says in the histories. All of these reasons have their place. However, I would like to suggest
that there is another reason to return to the histories, one that is less often recognized but perhaps more
important in the attempt to construct a meaningful life. We might return to those histories as reminders,
reminders of who we are and how we got to be that way, and, even more important, of the contingency of
both. We might return to Foucault’s histories for much the same reason Marcus Aurelius returns to the
truths of Stoicism in his meditations: to keep calling ourselves back to what we need to remember in order to
construct a meaningful life in a world that often pulls us in unhelpful directions. After all, if Foucault’s
histories are right, then we must bear in mind both that who we are is largely a product of what we do every
day and that there is much that happens to us every day to draw our attention away from the lessons those
histories have to offer. It is normalization, not experimentation, that is the rule of the day in academe and
elsewhere. A periodic reminder of the contingent and fragile, if forceful, character of the power of
normalization would not be unwelcome under these conditions. Let me turn now to the suggestion that
Deleuze, as well as Foucault, should be read as engaging in spiritual exercises, spiritual exercises whose goal
is, in many ways, not very different from that of Foucault’s. At first glance, Deleuze’s work may seem to
some of you a less likely candidate for the role of spiritual exercise than that of Foucault, particularly those
of you who are broadly familiar with the biographies of these two thinkers. However, I think that there is
reason to believe that Deleuze saw much of his work both as transformative for his own living and as an
invitation to his readers to transform their own lives. Perhaps the most striking evidence in favor of
approaching Deleuze’s work as a spiritual exercise comes at the beginning of his collaborative work with
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, where the authors discuss various types of books. They contrast the book as
rhizome with the book as tree. The rhizome book, they suggest, connects in various ways with things outside
the book in the world: influencing them, undercutting the previous connections between things, setting up
new connections, offering new possibilities. As they put it, “contrary to a deeply rooted belief, the book is not
an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the
world; the book assures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world effects a reterritorialization of
the book, which in turn deterritorializes itself in the world (if it is capable, if it can).”4 To read A Thousand
Plateaus, then, is to be faced not only with a new set of ideas but to be offered new ways of taking – or better,
taking up – the world which are connected not only with new ways of seeing but with alternative ways of
living. These alternative ways of living are summed up in Deleuze’s term “line of flight,” which, he often
emphasizes, does not mean a flight from something but an experiment in the world in which we live. So far,
albeit briefly, we have looked at the Deleuzian relation of the book to the reader. In addition to these
passages I have cited, there is another, lesser known work where Deleuze reveals his own relation to his
writing. In a letter to Michel Cressole, Deleuze responds to a criticism Cressole posed to his work that in
essence labelled Deleuze unoriginal, derivative relative to the experimenters his work, and especially Anti-
Oedipus, praises. Deleuze writes: If I don’t move, if I don’t travel, I have taken motionless trips just like
everyone else, and I can measure them only by my emotions, express them in the most oblique and diverted
way in what I write. And who cares about my relations with homosexuals, alcoholics, or drug addicts, if I
manage to achieve the same results as theirs by other means? The problem is not one of being this or that in
man, but rather one of becoming human, of a universal becoming animal … to undo the human organization
of the body, to cut across such and such a zone of intensity in the body, everyone of us discovering the zones
which are really his, and the groups, the populations, the species which inhabit him.5 I think, then, that we
may take Deleuze as constructing, for his own sake and for ours, works which should be read as spiritual
exercises, and wrestlings with and attempts to free us all from the grip of certain philosophical notions that
prevent us from discovering and creating who we might be, and of offering alternative visions that would
allow us to take other journeys. For Deleuze, those spiritual exercises involved journeys he took mostly in his
own mind, and mostly in the context of literature and philosophy. By contrast, Foucault’s exercises were
often carried on in more public, or at least more interpersonal, venues. For both Foucault and Deleuze,
however, their writings were entwined with their lives, and, they hoped, with ours, in ways that went well
beyond the matter of what we happened to believe or to say or to make our reputations on. They addressed
those places where we live, and those places where we might live. By way of concluding, let me turn briefly to
a strong contrast between the approach Deleuze takes to his spiritual exercises and the approach taken by
Foucault. There are, of course, many points of contrast. I don’t mean to cite this as the most important or
even the most interesting one. But it does point up how, in a certain way, opposite philosophical approaches
may yield the same result. The contrast I have in mind here is between the ontologies that Foucault and
Deleuze work with. Foucault’s ontology is, in general, very austere. He has written in many places of his
suspicion of the idea of essences, and of human essences in particular. His writings are rich in empirical work
and contingent social formations, poor in ontological posits. Deleuze’s ontology is much the opposite.
Although he draws liberally on the work of others both inside and outside philosophy, he is rarely interested
in empirical work. And his own approach is, we might say, ontologically populous. In keeping with his
suggestions in What is Philosophy?, there are many concepts, planes of immanence, and conceptual personae
inhabiting his writings. From schizophrenics (which, as Deleuze and Guattari often remind us, are not to be
confused with empirical schizophrenics) to Bergsonian pasts to haecceities to Being as difference to
becomings, Deleuze’s work is packed with ontological posits. His work is an ontological New York compared
with Foucault’s ontological Sahara. And yet, from these different ontologies, both Deleuze and Foucault
arrive at some fairly similar places. We have already seen that the prefatory remarks Foucault makes to
Anti-Oedipus could well serve as a coda to his own work. And, though personal relations between them
became strained, the relation between their projects has always been fruitful for their readers. How is it that
such different ontologies can lead to such similar results? Although I can only suggest the point here, I think
that, by grasping at opposite ontological commitments, Foucault and Deleuze were trying to solve much the
same problem: how to create as open a space as possible for the kinds of beliefs that could create alternative
ways of living. For Foucault, that project took shape as one involving the denial of as many ontological
constraints as possible. If our ontology is thin, that allows us to create our conceptual worlds in many
different ways, according to the ways we may try to create ourselves. Alternatively, if our ontology is thick,
diffuse, and proliferating, as Deleuze would have it, much the same result follows. There are so many things
in Deleuze’s thought that the attempt to capture them all in a neat system is an academic exercise in futility. I
believe that Deleuze intended it that way; and, in any case, that’s how it wound up. It was though Deleuze
said to us, “Here, if you want an ontology by means of which to grasp the world in thought, I’ll give you one
that doesn’t just grasp it, but overwhelms it. Now go discover what you can make of yourself.” In the end,
the point of the spiritual exercises that both Foucault and Deleuze carried out can be summed up in this
passage from A Thousand Plateaus: This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment
with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of
deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try
out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of land at all times.6 If this sounds like a
late twentieth-century version of the exhortations of earlier practitioners of spiritual exercises, it should.
What Foucault and Deleuze offer us – and all I have done here is to remind us of this – what they offer us is
the persistent vision that our lives do not have to be the way they are. We can loosen, if not cast off, the grip
our present has upon us in order not only to see other worlds and other lives but to live them. If, some two
millennia ago, Marcus Aurelius exhorted himself to resist the movement of the world, to make of himself
something more beautiful than it told him he could be, so, too, in our age do Foucault and Deleuze exhort
themselves and us to something more strange and beautiful than we are told that we can be. And, if we listen
to them, or to those others whose spiritual exercises speak to us, we may hope to create for ourselves a life
worth living, and in the end worth having lived. For, after all, what could be worse than to look back upon
one’s life in one’s last moments, see it complete, and be forced to say to oneself, “That’s not who I should
have been.”