Foucault on Freedom and Truth

In traditional ethics, ordinary life is overshadowed by what are identified as higher activities—contemplation for some, the citizen life for others. And in mediaeval Catholicism something like this overshadowing of ordinary lay life occurs relative to the dedicated life of priestly or monastic celibacy. Think for instance of the growth of the new understanding of the companionate marriage in the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries, the growing sense of the importance of emotional fulfillment in marriage—indeed the whole modern sense that one’s feelings are a key to the good life. The classical understanding of power turned on the notions of sovereignty and law. Much of early modern thought was taken up with definitions of sovereignty and legitimacy. The relation of domination within man, which is part of a stance of domination toward nature in general, cannot help engendering a domination of man by man.