The Care Of Self

By Michel Foucault

This book, focused on the Hellenistic and early Roman world, is not about comfort. It’s about craft.

The famous command is, of course, "Know Thyself." From Socrates or the oracle.

Foucault shows there was an older, deeper urgency. "Take Care of Thyself." Epimeleia heautou.

This wasn't just preparatory work. It was the essential moral act. It had to be continuous. Lifelong.

The care was the knowledge.

We tend to think of ethics as a list of rules. Or a moment of choice.

Foucault excavates the forgotten technology: the daily, quiet, repeatable tasks that shape the self.

The Stoics weren't interested in confession. They wanted mastery. Not over others, but over the self. The passionate, reactive, impulsive self.

How?

Through the Hypomnēmata. The spiritual notebook. A journal that wasn't for expression, but for weapons.

You record maxims. You copy wisdom. You write down the unexpected thing that happened, and then you rehearse the ethical response for next time. A sudden outburst of anger. A flash of fear. You write it down not to understand its root (that’s modern psychology), but to nullify its power in the future.

Writing and reflecting is essential.

The care of the self, for the Stoics, was a practice of freedom. Not the large, dramatic freedom of revolution or political choice, but the smaller, more immediate freedom:

Freedom from impulse. Freedom from chance. Freedom from being a slave to your own worst reaction.

It’s a deliberate art of not letting the self be merely a result of history, habit, or desire.

It’s an exercise in self-making. A quiet refusal to be finished.

This lines up with Goldsmith’s daily self review. I have also failed to do that.

“ to love is a greater boon than to be loved.”

“ Love rescues us from all errors that wreck or impaired wedlock.”