6th January 1982: first and second hour

• Striking shift of emphasis noted by Foucault, that the expression 'know yourself' is subordinated to the precept of care of the self (4)
• the role of the philosopher - as someone who awakens the people (questions about the extend of the people) - "to persuade him to care less about his property than about himself ... to consider less the things of the city than the city itself" (7). The horsefly analogy: "The care of the oneself is a sort of thorn which must be stuck into men's flesh, driven into their existence, and which is a principle of restlessness and movement, of continuous concern throughout life" (8).
• an event in thought - a general cultural phenomenon peculiar to a time yet that "is still significant for our modern mode of being subjects" (9).
• If the philosopher is one whom persuades people to care for themselves, what is this care for oneself that would so describe the parameters of philosophy? (i) a certain way of considering things, of behaving in the world; (ii) a certain form of attention, "a certain way of attending to what we think and what takes place in our thought" - meditation/self-reflection; (iii) actions exercised on the self by the self: "techniques of meditation, of memorization of the past, of examination of conscience, of checking representations which appear in the mind" (11)
• critique of the Cartesian moment - which reasserted the idea of knowing oneself over that of caring of oneself which erroneously "placed self-evidence at the origin" (14).
• a definition or use of the idea of 'spirituality' where philosophy is "the form of thought that asks, not of course what is true and what is false, but what determines that there is and can be truth and falsehood and whether or not we can separate the true and the false" (15). Three aspects of the subject as understood through three characteristics of spirituality (15-16).
• Critique of the Cartesian advocation of knowledge with internal formal rules of method and external cultural conditions, the milieu for performative efficacy etc. Curiously, and a question to return to, this is not spiritual: the key difference - in the modern age of the Cartesian "the subject is capable of truth, but that, such as it is, the truth cannot save the subject"; and in spirituality as philosophy, "the subject is not capable of truth, but that, such as it is, the truth can transfigure and save the subject" (19). Why does the subject need saving? Why is salvation important? Salvation from what? On whose terms?

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• there cannot be knowledge without a profound modification in the subject's being (27; cf 15)
• shift from eros to polis crucial c.400BC through the edict: "Care of the self: the point at which the notion emerges is here, between privilege and political action" (36). This is Foucault's relation of philosophy to politics?
• [Notes on Techne (35)].
• Questions: what is the self? How does caring for the self develop knowledge of the techne necessary to engage the world (politically)? What is truth?