ABSTRACT
Many people talk about seeing themselves and their lives as a work of art. This thought builds on the post-modern idea that ‘the grand narratives’ about, for example, God, reason, and truth have collapsed. All the values that were seen to be absolute in the past have lost their credibility, and ‘the subject,’ which used to be the seat of moral knowledge and action, has dissolved. The identity of post-modern man is thus unclear and his existence uncertain. According to thinkers like Michel Foucault these problems can be solved by developing what he calls an aesthetics of existence, and this ‘aesthetics’ is precisely about regarding oneself and one’s life as a work of art (Foucault, 1991: 350–351). Foucault links the aesthetics of existence and the problems to which it is a response to the ancient Greeks. He believes that Greek ethics were focused on ‘the problem of personal choice,’ and that these ethics were a reaction to problems similar to those we are experiencing today with our loss of faith in religion-based ethics and our distaste for our private lives being controlled by law. Foucault is manipulating history, however, for actually Greek ethics were closely linked to mythology, in other words the religiosity of the time. These ethics found their cohesion, their effect, and their credibility in references to the sphere of absolute values that the Greek gods still represented in mythological form at the time of Plato and Aristotle. In fact, the preference of Foucault and other post-modern theoreticians for reflecting ethical questions in aesthetics does not derive from antiquity but from the 18th century. More specifically, it is related to a phenomenon known at the time as ‘the beautiful soul.’ Admittedly, the beautiful soul does refer back to antiquity, to the Greek ideal of a beautiful-and-good person, but when old ideas are taken up again, they generally result in something new. This also happened to the beautiful-and-good person, when it became the beautiful soul, and the same is happening now when the beautiful soul has become ‘me as a work of art.’
