What Does “Take Care of Yourself” Mean? The History of a Phrase

“Socrates says three important things with regard to his invitation to others to occupy themselves with themselves: (1) His mission was conferred on him by the gods…(2) For this task he demands no reward… (3) His mission is useful for the city more useful than the Athenians military victory at Olympia - because in teaching people too occupy themselves with themselves, he teaches them to occupy themselves with the city.

Eight centuries later, one finds the same notion and the same phrase in Gregory of Nyssa’s treatise, On Virginity, but with an entirely different meaning. Gregory did not mean the movement by which one takes care of oneself and the city; he meant the movement by which one renounces the world and marriage and detaches oneself from the flesh and, with virginity of heart and body, recovers the immortality of which one has been deprived.”

— Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self

1. The Same Words

In Technologies of the Self, Michel Foucault draws attention to a curious continuity. Socrates repeatedly urged his contemporaries to take care of themselves. Centuries later, Gregory of Nyssa used the language of self-care in a Christian context. Yet the same injunction did not mean the same thing.

For Socrates, care of the self was connected with the formation of the soul, the examination of how one lived, and the capacity to participate properly in the life of the city. In Gregory, the same expression belongs to a world of sin, purification, divine truth, and salvation. The soul must be searched and transformed in order to recover what has been obscured.

The words have changed very little. Their meaning, however, has changed considerably.

This is what makes “Take care of yourself” philosophically interesting. Its meaning does not travel intact through history. The expression survives, but the relations surrounding it change: the concepts associated with it, the practices it authorizes, the kind of person it addresses, and the purposes it serves.

The question is therefore deceptively simple: What does it mean to take care of yourself?

To answer it, we first have to ask what kind of “self” the injunction presupposes.

2. What Does “Yourself” Mean?

The most deceptive word in the expression may be “yourself.”

“Take care of yourself” appears to describe a simple relation: someone acts, and the self receives the care. But the apparent simplicity depends on assuming that we already know what “the self” is.

The Greek expression epimeleia heautou is usually translated as “care of the self.” Epimeleia is a noun referring to care, attention, or concern; heautou is a reflexive pronoun, “of oneself.” Grammatically, there is nothing mysterious here. Philosophically, however, the reflexive is unstable.

For Socrates, the self at stake is bound to the condition of the soul, virtue, knowledge, and the question of how one should live. In Gregory of Nyssa, the soul exists within a theological drama of creation, sin, purification, and salvation. In contemporary discourse, “yourself” often suggests an individual with psychological needs, personal boundaries, and a claim to wellbeing.

The pronoun remains. What it refers to does not.

This is one reason translation can be deceptive. When heautou becomes “yourself,” the English word can easily carry assumptions about psychological individuality and personal identity that belong more to our own vocabulary than to the ancient one.

The problem, then, is not simply that different periods have different ideas about self-care. It is that they may constitute differently what counts as a self that can be cared for.

A phrase does not carry its meaning intact through history. Its meaning depends on the relations it establishes with other concepts, practices, institutions, and forms of life. “Care” means something different when it is connected to virtue and the city, to God and salvation, or to therapy and wellbeing.

The verbal form survives, but the field in which it functions has been reorganized.

3. Four Configurations of Self-Care

The history Foucault sketches can be approached through four different configurations. They should not be understood as sealed historical compartments. They are different ways in which the relation between the self and its care becomes intelligible.

Socratic care: formation

In the Socratic context, taking care of oneself is inseparable from the question of how one should live.

In the Apology, Socrates presents his activity as a mission: he urges the Athenians to care for themselves rather than being preoccupied only with wealth, reputation, and external success. This care is not a private retreat from public life. On the contrary, Foucault emphasizes that Socrates regards it as useful to the city. By teaching people to care for themselves, he teaches them to care properly for the city.

The self therefore has to be formed. To care for oneself is to examine one's life, one's relation to knowledge, virtue, and truth. The point is not simply to feel better or protect an existing identity. The self is something that must be worked upon.

The injunction might therefore be expressed as: Become capable of living well.

Greco-Roman care: exercise

Later philosophical practices give this relation a more systematic and practical character. In Stoic traditions, care of the self involves exercises through which one works continuously upon one's judgments, desires, conduct, and relation to events.

Epictetus asks his students to distinguish between what depends on them and what does not. Seneca recommends practices of examination and reflection through which one reviews one's conduct and prepares oneself for future situations.

Here the self is not simply an object of theoretical knowledge. It is something exercised.

The emphasis falls on repetition, discipline, attention, and training. One does not care for oneself once and for all. Care becomes a practice of living.

The injunction now takes a different form: Practice the relation to yourself that allows you to live well.

The difference from the Socratic formulation is subtle but important. The question is no longer only what kind of person one ought to become. It is also how one repeatedly trains oneself to become that person.

Christian care: examination and transformation

Christian asceticism retains the language of care while reorganizing its meaning around a different conception of the self.

Foucault's example is Gregory of Nyssa's On Virginity. Gregory uses the parable of the lost drachma: the person must light the lamp, search the house, and recover the coin hidden in the darkness. The image becomes a model for searching the soul.

But what is being sought is not simply a better version of the existing self. The soul has been obscured and must be purified. The body and its desires are placed within a theological drama in which the human being has become separated from an original condition of immortality.

Care therefore becomes examination. One searches oneself for what must be uncovered, purified, renounced, or transformed.

The injunction is no longer primarily: How can I form myself?

It becomes: What must be transformed in me so that I can recover what I have lost?

The reflexive structure remains, but its meaning has been radically reorganized.

Contemporary care: protection and maintenance

The contemporary vocabulary of self-care introduces another configuration.

To “take care of yourself” today may mean getting enough sleep, exercising, managing stress, protecting one's mental health, setting boundaries, taking time for oneself, or attending to one's emotional needs. These practices are not necessarily trivial or superficial. They respond to real forms of exhaustion, pressure, vulnerability, and psychological strain.

But the dominant conception of the self has changed. The self is increasingly understood as an individual whose wellbeing must be monitored and maintained.

The emphasis is therefore less on forming the soul, exercising a philosophical discipline, or transforming oneself before God. It is more often on preserving a functioning and healthy self.

The injunction becomes: Protect and sustain yourself.

These four configurations do not constitute a simple progression from “primitive” to “modern.” Nor does each period possess a single meaning of self-care. The point is more limited and more revealing: the same grammatical structure can organize very different relations between a person and themselves.

The phrase has not simply acquired four definitions. It has entered four different arrangements of the self.

For Socrates, it asks the individual to become; in Greco-Roman philosophy, to practice; in Christianity, to examine and transform; in contemporary discourse, to protect and sustain.

What changes is therefore not merely the meaning of the words. What changes is what the injunction does to the person who receives it.

4. Can Foucault Read the Past?

But this creates a problem for Foucault himself.

If the meaning of “take care of yourself” depends on the historical relations in which it functions, then Foucault's own interpretation cannot simply stand outside those relations. The phrase has a history. So does the historian who reconstructs that history.

This does not mean that historical interpretation is impossible, or that every interpretation is equally valid. Foucault's argument is constrained by texts, practices, institutions, and historical evidence. But his own categories—subject, practice, truth, technology, care—also organize what becomes visible in the material he studies.

This becomes particularly interesting in his reading of Plato's Alcibiades.

Foucault emphasizes the importance of care of the self and the techniques through which a person works upon themselves. His broader project consequently gives considerable importance to the ways subjects constitute themselves through practices.

Yet this emphasis has been challenged by Albert Joosse's reading of the Alcibiades. Joosse argues that Foucault underestimates an important feature of Plato's dialogue: the self that emerges through the practice of care is constituted through an interpersonal and reciprocal dialectic. The relation with another person is not merely the setting in which self-care takes place. It is part of what constitutes the self being cared for.

This is more than a minor correction.

If the other is constitutive of the self, then the phrase “take care of yourself” may conceal something important. The reflexive pronoun seems to establish a relation between me and myself, but that relation may already depend upon relations with others. I learn to examine myself through dialogue. I acquire standards of conduct through others. I become capable of recognizing myself as a subject through forms of recognition and interaction that are not simply internal.

The problem is therefore symmetrical.

Foucault teaches us to ask what historical relations make an expression intelligible. We can apply the same question to Foucault's own account. What relations make his concept of the self intelligible? Which relations does his analysis illuminate, and which might it leave in the background?

His emphasis on technologies of the self is extraordinarily productive, but the Alcibiades suggests that the self may never be quite as self-contained as the language of self-care makes it appear.

The “self” may already contain the other.

And this matters for Foucault's larger historical argument. His famous claim is that antiquity organized the relation between “take care of yourself” and “know yourself” differently from the modern world. In Greco-Roman culture, he argues, knowledge of oneself appeared as a consequence of taking care of oneself; in the modern world, knowledge of oneself became the fundamental principle.

The reversal is illuminating. But it is also an interpretation—a particular way of arranging a complicated historical field.

Once we recognize that, the methodological lesson of Foucault's own work turns back upon itself. If meanings are historically constituted, then interpretations are not exempt from historicity. The historian is not outside the history being described.

This does not weaken the archaeological project. It makes its reflexive dimension unavoidable.

Foucault gives us a way of seeing that the phrase “take care of yourself” never possessed a single, stable meaning. But his own account reminds us that seeing this historical variability requires a particular conceptual arrangement of our own.

The question is no longer simply what the phrase meant. It is also: what makes a particular meaning visible to us?

5. Whose Self?

We can now return to the phrase with which we began: Take care of yourself.

The phrase has remained. The self to which it refers has not.

Socrates, the Stoics, Gregory of Nyssa, and contemporary therapeutic culture do not simply give different answers to the same question. They inhabit different configurations in which the question itself acquires a different meaning.

The history of the expression is therefore also a history of the selves that could recognize it as an intelligible injunction.

This is why the apparently ordinary phrase is philosophically useful. It seems transparent precisely because the historical world that gives it meaning is normally invisible. We hear “yourself” and assume that we know what it refers to. We hear “care” and assume that we know what kind of activity is being described.

But neither is self-evident. To ask what “take care of yourself” means is ultimately to ask a more unsettling question: What kind of self does a historical world make possible?

References

Epictetus. (2014). Discourses, fragments, handbook (R. Hard, Trans.; C. Gill, Ed.). Oxford University Press.

Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self. In L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, & P. H. Hutton (Eds.), Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault (pp. 16–49). University of Massachusetts Press.

Foucault, M. (2005). The hermeneutics of the subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–82 (G. Burchell, Trans.; F. Gros, Ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.

Gregory of Nyssa. (1999). On virginity. In V. W. Callahan (Trans.), Saint Gregory of Nyssa: Ascetical works (pp. 35–97). Catholic University of America Press.

Joosse, A. (2015). Foucault’s subject and Plato’s mind: A dialectical model of self-constitution in the Alcibiades. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 41(2), 159–177.

Plato. (1997). Alcibiades. In J. M. Cooper & D. S. Hutchinson (Eds.), Complete works (pp. 557–588). Hackett Publishing Company.

Seneca. (2015). Letters on ethics: To Lucilius (M. Graver & A. A. Long, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.