Foucault, Reader of Plato: The Problem of ἐπιμέλεια τοῦ βίου

In his 1984 College de France lectures (The Courage of Truth), Foucault identifies a difference between care of the soul and care of bios (way of life), based on his readings, respectively of Plato’s First Alcibiades and Laches. This constitutes a revision of Foucault’s pronouncements in his 1982 lectures (The Hermeneutics of the Subject). In this chapter, I examine the philological and philosophical foundations of this distinction by going back to Plato’s Laches and interpreting it under the Foucauldian soul-bios distinction. While the conceptual interplay between care and neglect in the existential situation of the old fathers and the opposition between logoi (words) and erga (deeds) in the speeches of Laches and Nicias point towards a clearer distinction between soul and bios, Socrates’s dialogical practice suggests that the object of care is still very much the soul itself. The Foucauldian distinction, while philosophically fertile, does not sufficiently emphasise the deep connection between soul and bios that pervades the Laches.