Following SocratesFoucault. He too noticed the difference between ancient and
modern philosophy, describing it in moral terms. The ancient
philosophers elaborated their lives as a creative exercise of their
moral will, he said. With Christianity, though, morality came to
be conceived of as obedience to a code or rules. The difference is
not that the former was libertarian and the latter authoritarian;
both could be tough ways of life. The difference is that one led
to the cultivation of a way of life, the other to a submission of
one’s life to an ecclesiastical authority.
The reason this distinction was of interest to Foucault
stemmed from his belief that it profoundly shapes the way
people live today even in the secular world. He detected this
ethic of submission in the everyday, whether that be expressed
in adhering to dress codes at work or in the way that ethics as a
whole is thought of in terms of rules.
The problem for Foucault, and for us, is that one cannot
simply wind back the clock and reinstate the old philosophy. The
modern way of life with its pervasive codes of behaviour does
not readily allow it. But as a fi rst step, at least, in his last works,
Foucault developed a more modest task for contemporary philos-
ophy. It could begin with the effort to think differently – another
way of pushing at the boundaries of certainty. Philosophy could
study the past not so much to recover what may otherwise be
lost, nor to weigh up the ethical dilemmas ancient people faced.
Rather, as a new form of philosophical exercise that may suggest
new ways of re-imagining the present by engaging with the par-
ticularities of now. At a personal level, for Foucault, one mani-
festation of this was in relation to his homosexuality. Received
wisdom in gay culture is that liberation means coming out.
However, by contrasting the modern understanding of gayness,
which designates a form of human behaviour, with ancient
attitudes towards same-sex couples where it was seen as an
expression of socialisation and love, Foucault argued that the
contemporary label of homosexual could be oppressive regard-
less of whether someone was open about their sexuality or not.
This suggested a further philosophical exercise that sought a way