The Greeks had fewer words for it
Jasper Griffin
THE CARE OF THE SELF: HISTORY OF SEXUALITY, VOLUME III by Michel Foucault
Allen Lane, £17.95, pp. 279
Michel Foucault embarked on his History of Sexuality in the early 1970s and published the first volume, La Volonte de Savoir, in 1976. That volume was a short and brilliant display of fireworks, attacking the widespread and banal notion that 'in the beginning' sexual activity was guilt-free and delicious, being repressed and blighted only by the gloom of Victorianism. Foucault argued that, on the contrary, the changes which really can be seen to have taken place, from the 17th century on- wards, had quite the opposite effect from that of suppressing the discussion of sex or minimising its importance. Sexual dis- course, in fact, multiplied and diversified in unprecedented ways and on an unpre- cedented scale, with the creation, in the generations which culminated in the work of Freud, of that extraordinary and para- doxical phenomenon, a 'confessional scien- ce' of sexual introspection, cross- examination, and classification. The va- rious sexual eccentricities were for the first time distinguished, named, written up, and assumed to have separate existence as hypostatised realities. 'The homosexual' and 'the fetishist' were born. The treatment of sexuality thus centred on an ever greater quantity of discussion with teachers, parents and doctors and the relationship of power that this implies. That introductory volume was published in English (The History of Sexuality: An Introduction), in 1979. Already Foucault found himself moving in directions which he had not foreseen. His work was to be, not a history of sex, but one of sexuality: a word which he uses to mean the attitudes which men and women have towards themselves as sexual agents, their ways of understanding the phenomena of sex. It turned out that the subject could not be adequately tackled by starting even in the 17th century. The conceptions of that late Christian period developed out of early Christian concep- tions, which in turn needed to be seen against the background of the thought of pagan Greece and Rome. Although not a classical scholar, Foucault plunged into the sexual thinking of the ancient world. In 1984 he published his second volume, L'Usage des Plaisirs; in English, as The Use of Pleasure, it is published, like the first volume, as a Peregrine Book. This turned out, despite its alluring title and spicy dust-jacket, to be an account of the atti- tudes of sex of serious-minded classical Greeks. By no means a prurient read, it set out the ways in which such persons, philo- sophers and doctors, handled the poten- tially disruptive and disorderly questions of sex and sexual indulgence. He had done a great deal of work, and the book is scholarly as well as being full of powerful and arresting insights. Superficial thought has often contrasted pagan sexuality very sharply with Christian ideas and practices. Sometimes Christians and moralists have delighted to point the contrast with a Godless world of licence. Foucault pointed out that already in the fourth century BC sexual relations were the subject, at least among the high- minded, of widespread anxiety and prescriptions for careful control. Some of those prescriptions had a resemblance to Christian ones — fear of the bad consequ- ences of sexual indulgence, praise for sexual abstinence, praise for fidelity to one's wife, intense anxiety about homosex- ual relationships with boys. But their underlying rationale was quite different. Not a belief that sex was, as St Augustine fatally thought it, in itself bad, the dis- obedience of the members to the will recalling and re-enacting the original fall of man: rather, a feeling that it was a physi- cally and mentally disturbing business, which if not done right could enfeeble the body and call in question the self-mastery by which a free man showed his superiority to women, barbarians, and slaves. Sexual abstinence, conjugal fidelity, avoidance of carnal relations with boys, all were ways of demonstrating that self-mastery. An art of rational living, a style which enjoyed plea- sure but was not swamped by it: such was the aim. The-resemblance to Christian ideas was largely illusory. The third volume, Le Souci de Sot, appeared in French at the same time as the second, and it is now published in English. In 1984 Foucault died, leaving a fourth volume, on early Christianity, to appear posthumously. In his third volume he moves on to the sexual ideals of the early Roman Empire and finds interesting de- velopments. In classical Greece, theorists of marriage had tended to start by viewing the relationship as essentially economic and productive. For legitimate off-spring one needed a wife; also for the manage- ment of one's household. Her tempera- ment — careful, timid and housebound — naturally complemented the outdoor and acquisitive temperament of a husband. She Should be treated with respect and affec- tion, but the union was fundamentally one of shared aims, neither party being inde- pendent alone. It is important to remem- ber, of course, that this was the rationalisa- tion of marriage by theorists rather than the lived experience of couples, but still there is a real contrast with writings of about 100 AD. Then Plutarch and Pliny regard the conjugal relationship as the sharing of an intense emotional life — husband and wife hate to be apart, the details of their sexual relations are impor- tant, the obligation on the husband to be faithful is now much stronger. Human nature, we now hear, has not only econo- mic and procreative need of a partner: it needs a life of shared affection. Meanwhile pederastic love, though by no means ex- tinct, is no longer the focus of keen interest and discussion. It cannot compete in in- tensity with such marriages.
Another development is the increase of introspection. The self is felt to be fragile, it needs to be watched like a tender plant. Doctors and philosophers increasingly dic- tate the whole of people's lives, and both physical and moral hypochondria are dis- cernible. Is the way being prepared for Christianity? Yes and no. Foucault is right to insist that the Greeks and Romans always persisted in two very un-Christian attitudes. One was that sexual acts, with few exceptions, were not right or wrong in themselves, but only according as circumst- ances made them so. The other was that self-mastery was an aesthetic even more than a moral matter; not the avoidance of sin, but the maintenance of a certain style of living, a certain relationship with oneself as a rational and consciously superior being. Perhaps this looks forward less to Christianity than to the post-Christian Age of Anxiety in which we ourselves live and worry about our sexuality. As Foucault says in another place: Antiquity was the age of pleasure; then there was the age of love; now we live in the age of sex. The Point is the antithesis of the third not only With the second but also with the first. To cease to believe in an overblown and overdemanding conception of sex, to re- turn to a rational pursuit of pleasure: that may yet be the way for humanity in the aftermath of Aids.
Jasper Griffin is a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford and author of The Oxford History Of the Classical World.
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