Attentive ears and forward-looking eyes: disciplining the senses and forming the self in the Book of Proverbs

Abstract

Ancient Israelite sages recognized a dilemma regarding sensory perception: the senses are vehicles for acquiring wisdom, yet they are also channels of temptation. The sages responded to this dilemma by devising strategies for disciplining vision and audition. These strategies – which may be understood as Foucauldian technologies of the self – were designed to train sensory attention. Through these techniques of the self, the sages aimed to develop in students what Bourdieu terms practical mastery over eyes and ears, inscribing the wisdom tradition’s values in the bodies of students and preparing them to navigate the broader social world. My study thus suggests that one goal of Jewish wisdom literature was to cultivate a regime of perception that facilitated the construction of the human self. Recovering this specifically Jewish self in antiquity augments and complicates traditional modern Western histories of the self.