Foucault refused to prescribe how people should live, offering descriptions instead of directives.

Evidence

One did not suggest what people ought to be, what they ought to do, what they ought to think and believe. It was a matter rather of showing how social mechanisms up to now have been able to work…and then, starting from there, one left to the people themselves, knowing all the above, the possibility of self-determination and the choice of their own existence… … If not for the solemnity of the title and the imposing marks that Nietzsche left on it, I would say yes. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1239

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s distinction between prescriptive ethics and genealogy of ethics, which he elsewhere said he was ‘writing a genealogy of ethics.’