A link and accompanying post from Vince Rafael is useful in understanding what has happened last week during the papal visit: There has been a explosion of spirituality in the wake of the Papal visit in the Philippines. Ive been trying to make sense of this phenomenon and turned to Foucault (who was, after all, Jesuit-educated). Some years ago, he wrote about a similar surge of spiritual fervor in the midst of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and began to develop the notion of spiritual politics (or political spirituality, Im never quite sure). In his later works, he goes back to the Greek, Roman and early Christian practices of caring for the self and truth-telling as basic elements of spirituality. Heres a useful capsule definition: Foucault defines spirituality as the methods the subject uses to transform him or herself in order to gain access to the truth. He describes the conflict between spirituality and theology as being the important historical issue rather than a conflict between spirituality and science. Foucault also recasts the standard Church versus State opposition as instead an opposition between pastoral and sovereign forms of power. Foucault notes a number of differences in the ways pre-Cartesian and post-Cartesian systems approached the problem of acquiring knowledge and the notion of self-transformation. He describes this as the difference between the spiritual exercises and intellectual method. PS: check out the handy link below which also has capsule definitions of key terms like pastoral and sovereign power. Also interesting to note that what stands against spirituality, conceived always as a practice of self-transformation in view of truth telling, is theology, not science. And, we might add, neither is spirituality necessarily linked to religion. michel-foucault/concepts/
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 19:03:37 +0000
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