Hugo von Hofmannsthal – Jedermann (Everyman)

• Theme: Modern morality play; confrontation with mortality, wealth, and divine judgment.

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

Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann—a 20th-century retelling of the medieval morality play Everyman—is less a pious sermon than a profound staging of subjectivity in crisis. Through Michel Foucault’s philosophical lens, it becomes a theatrical meditation on the transformation of ethics from external codes to internalized practices of the self, especially at the moment when sovereign authority is no longer credible, yet the care of the self remains imperative.

Foucault, particularly in The Care of the Self, shows how ancient ethics were less about obedience to rules and more about shaping the self as a worthy aesthetic form. Jedermann dramatizes the modern collapse of that ideal. Here is a man, wealthy, powerful, arrogant—living according to a secular ethic of pleasure and possession—but utterly unprepared for death. His lifestyle has been shaped not by a technē tou biou (technique of life), but by disavowal, a refusal to face finitude. This lack of ethical self-cultivation becomes his downfall.

What makes Jedermann quintessentially modern is not just its themes, but its aesthetic of disruption. As in Foucault’s archaeology of discourse, Jedermann reveals a rupture in the moral grammar of being. In the original medieval version, salvation is relatively stable—secured through confession and repentance within a coherent theological system. In Hofmannsthal’s hands, however, the structure has hollowed. Death arrives not as divine messenger, but as a discursive shockwave. The characters around Jedermann—Good Works, Mammon, Faith, and Death—are figures of fragmented moral discursivity, not agents of a unified worldview.

Jedermann’s fall is not simply spiritual—it is ontological. As Foucault observed, modern subjectivity emerges when the soul becomes the prison of the body—when the self is locked in a perpetual interrogation. Jedermann’s journey, then, is less about being judged by God than about judging himself, but with tools that no longer fit the world. His wealth, friends, and pleasures fall away, revealing a self that was never trained in the discipline of mortality.

In this way, Jedermann becomes a theatre of the technologies of self, and its failure. The play invites us to ask: what remains when all discourses—of capital, love, and power—are stripped bare by death? For Foucault, ethics begins where governance ends, and that space—so raw and exposed—is exactly where Jedermann concludes: on the threshold of the unknown, not with certainty, but with the demand to reformulate subjectivity from nothingness.