Everyman (Anonymous)

Theme: Moral reckoning, judgment, and the solitary journey of the soul.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

In Everyman, Foucault’s late ethics finds a compelling stage. Here is a theatre of subjectivation par excellence, dramatizing the Christian subject’s journey from worldly entanglement to self-transformation—a theatrical map of the care of the self as defined not through pleasure but through death, confession, and renunciation.

At first glance, the play’s Christian morality appears static, governed by divine command. But as Foucault teaches us, power is not monolithic—it operates through practices, rituals, discourses. Everyman is such a discursive machine: a performative rite where the audience is invited to contemplate the self not as identity, but as task. The anonymous protagonist becomes a template for the audience’s own soul—a laboratory of ethical reflection.

In The History of Sexuality Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure, Foucault turns to the Greeks, whose ethics centered on how to conduct oneself—ethos—through moderation, self-mastery, and philosophical contemplation. In Everyman, this becomes a Christianized aesthetic of existence: not through rational balance, but through penitence, humility, and the purging of worldly dependencies.

Everyman is initially tethered to Fellowship, Goods, and Strength—the “external” relations that Foucault might describe as technologies of the self oriented toward social prestige and corporeal confidence. As these personified allies abandon him, what’s revealed is a sovereign crisis: the illusion of self as accumulation collapses.

The moment of transformation begins not in abstract belief but in embodied ethical practice: confession, scourging, absolution. Here, Everyman becomes a theatre of technē tou biou—the art of living—manifesting precisely what Foucault insists the modern world has forgotten: that morality is not merely obeyed, but crafted.

In Volume 3: The Care of the Self, Foucault explains that ethical subjectivity in late antiquity was rooted in practices—reading, reflection, dietary regulation, self-examination. In Everyman, this ethic is dramatized through pilgrimage: the soul must unlearn possession and companionship to rediscover Knowledge, Good Deeds, and Strength in its purified, solitary form.

Most crucially, the audience becomes a moral spectator—not merely consuming the allegory but absorbing its mirror-like reflection. In Foucault’s philosophy, subjectivation is not imposed from without but assembled from discursive participation. Watching Everyman becomes an act of self-inquiry, an invitation to sculpt a life toward its eschatological horizon.