미셸 푸코의 자기 배려와 그리스도교 영성에 관한 고찰

Abstract

Contemporary churches have had lively discussions regarding the definition and the methodology of Christian spirituality. However, there still exists diverse drawbacks and chaotic confusion in terms of definition of spirituality. This essay aims to figure out the concept of the care of the self(epimuleia heautou) developed by the a French philosopher, Michel Foucault(1926-1984). In doing so, it will provoke productive debate on the understanding of spirituality for the consensual agreement among Christian milieu. For Foucault, spirituality is a creative and aesthetics process that the self constructs him/herself as an art. Thus, he calls the care of the self as the aesthetics of the existence. Additionally, by doing so, Foucault has demonstrated the possibility of pursuing an ethical autonomous self which enables the self to escape from the Cartesian rational subjectivity, that is, formed by the conspiracy between the power and knowledge in discourses.BR According to Foucault, the philosophy, both in the ancient Greece and in the late antiquity in Rome, embraced both the self-recognition and selfconsideration. A true philosophy evokes an holistic transformation or metamorphosis of the self. So to speak, philosophy was a spiritual discipline. However, since Christian fathers in late antiquity have developed their own technologies of the self-consideration, the pivotal idea of the care of the self has been substantially transformed from the self-care to self-recognition. The penitential rite forced the self to interrogate itself. Christian asceticism began to impose the purgatorial obligations on the self. Thus, the autonomy of the selfcultivation has disappeared among Christian self technology and finally the self fell in the pitfall as the object to govern.