Technology and Subjectivity in the Thought of Alasdair MacIntyre and Michel Foucault

Two of the dominant forms of accessing truth in the contemporary world, religion and science, conflict partly because they form the subject in different ways. The methodological reductionism of biology forms one to see organisms and bodies as manipulable, a perspective at odds with Christian conceptions of Creation, which see creatures as gifts from God and ourselves as embodied spirits. In this dissertation, I use the analyses of Alasdair MacIntyre and Michel Foucault to develop this critique and a response to it, arguing that Foucault's recovery of Stoic care of the self provides an ethical template for Christians who are biologists. In Chapter 1, I describe MacIntyre's critique of bureaucratic individualism, which depends on managerial expertise to manipulate individuals instead of forming them in virtue. He encourages technai, practices similar to traditional crafts. MacIntyre misses the productive aspect of managerial technique, which forms entrepreneurial subjects, and problematic aspects of technai, which form practitioners into a technological rationality. To address these problems, in Chapter 2, I draw on Foucault's analyses of disciplinary techniques that subject the individual to power through action on the body and governmentality that forms subjects in their use of liberty. I turn to constructive solutions in Chapter 3, arguing that MacIntyre's Aristotelian ethics is less helpful than Foucault's Stoic care of the self. MacIntyre requires the Christian biologist to isolate herself from the community of biologists, while Foucault describes techniques of the self analogous to Christian ascetic techniques that form the individual while she lives in a secular world. In Chapter 4, I show how these techniques help the scientist to uphold scientific truth against threats from corporate and political actors by encouraging the virtue of parrhesia, truth-speaking. I address skepticism about Foucault's thought arising from his seeming relativism in Chapter 5 by analyzing his complex notions of truth and the subject and relating them to Augustinian accounts of the imago dei. I argue that a Logos theology in which Jesus Christ both grounds the truth of the world and is the ethical exemplar provides a substantive Christian account to complete Foucault's formal model of ethics.