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Michel Foucault: The Cultivation of the Self Michel Foucault (1926-1984) spent much of the later part of his studies on the idea of the care of the self and cultivation of the self. He defined such care as using one’s own reason to ascertain wh ....

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... possibility that he could aid others in doing the same. He was trying to develop a way for one to work on himself, which would let one “invent a way of being that is still improbable”. Foucault did not address himself to a broad audience; rather, he used his project of the are of the self as a model for oppressed minorities who had no voice of their own. Foucault was fascinated by what one or a group has to suppress and reject to form a positive conception of itself. He believed that our conception of ourselves as subjects depends on controlling or excluding whole classes of people who do not fit our Enlightened category of “normal”. The ...