Body, Wife, Boys and Truth
Reading Foucault's 'The History of Sexuality,' Part I.
This is Part I of my series on Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. It covers the introduction to the second volume, The Use of Pleasure. For an overview The History of Sexuality as a whole and its place in Foucault’s work, start with my introduction to the series.
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The introduction to The Use of Pleasure (L’usage des plaisirs—“pleasures” more accurately plural in the French) is a brief 32 pages in the English translation. While not easy reading for anyone it is exceptionally clear, and you can follow the argument without any background in classics, theology, or philosophy—though those certainly help. I hadn’t heard of most of the figures he mentions besides big names like Socrates, Plato and Seneca. But it doesn’t matter; they only appear here to set up the questions he is going to ask.
Foucault does three things in the introduction, each of which are neatly contained in their own short chapter:
First, he explains his shift in perspective and approach from Volume 1, which I outlined in the introduction. (I’m skipping Volume 1 because it is the one that is most familiar, and more in the style of the “earlier” Foucault.)
Second, he notes an initial curiosity that led him to his approach: many of the notions we might assume to be typical of Christian sexual morality—a worry about masturbation as a threat to physical and social health; an ideal of moderate, controlled sexual activity and marital fidelity; a dim view of male effeminacy; and a link between sexual abstinence and special access to wisdom—were in fact common in the texts of classical antiquity. In short, there were four recurring areas of concern: the body, the wife, boys and truth. If such concerns were in fact continuous across antiquity and Christianity, what was the difference between the two? What kind of method would help us get at the “break” between them?
Third, Foucault defines what he means by the “morality” whose history the book will examine. “Morality” is a general term with many meanings. He boils those down to two “types” of morality: code morality (codified systems of rules and prohibitions) versus ethical or ascetic morality (models of living rightly on an individual level). One type is not classical and the other Christian; both types exist within each, and there was no hard break between them. Foucault’s approach will be to examine changes in the relationship between these two types of morality over time. Which type predominates, and which of the four “concerns” receive emphasis? Here he hints at an overall thesis: classical morality was more ethical than codified, and Greek moral ideals had nothing to do with certain sexual behaviors and pleasures being prohibited.
From power to ethics
Foucault begins by saying he had set out to write “a history of the experience of sexuality” that is not a story about repression, one that assumes “sexuality” is a constant that is more or less repressed at different points in time. (Remember: anti-Freud.) The notion of “sexuality” itself is a very modern idea, so he aims to “stand back from it, bracketing its familiarity, in order to analyze the theoretical and practical content with which it has been associated” (3). Here we have classic Foucault, seeing things we take to be obvious natural facts to be, rather, created by knowledge: something begins to “exist” in the Foucault paradigm when humans make it a problem and create knowledge about it.
Foucault says that he initially planned to study sexuality along three “axes”:
The formation of the sciences of sexuality (medical/social sciences)
Systems of power that regulate sexual practices (legal/political systems)
“The forms within which individuals are able, are obliged, to recognized themselves as subjects of this sexuality” (4)
The first two are clear enough and are directly continuous with the style of Foucault’s earlier work on madness and criminality, which he also held to be brought into being by scientific study and governmental techniques.
The third is kind of obscure but is the most important, because Foucault says it is what will now shift his emphasis toward. He tries again to define it as “the practices through which individuals were led to focus their attention on themselves” and “how individuals were led to practice, on themselves and on others, a hermeneutics1 of desire” (5).
I put the emphasis on individuals there because looking at this process from the perspective of the individual—as opposed to systems of knowledge—is indeed a shift. Foucault is not rejecting or denying the way that systems shape us as sexual “subjects,” but he is stating a new emphasis on how individuals relate to those systems from their own perspective.2 On the systemic scale: Why are people given rules and models according which to evaluate their own desires and behavior? Why is sexuality always such a prominent focus of those rules, as opposed to other areas of social life? On the individual scale: What do people actually do with those rules?
Foucault thinks that this question leads to an even broader one, one that will shed a different light on the history of sexuality than a focus on the repression of libidinal drives. How did the “problematization” of sexuality emerge from the ancient ethics or “techniques of the self” or “arts of existence”? I love his definition of these ars existentia:
those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre3 that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria.
Four problem areas: body, wife, boys and truth
In Chapter 2, Foucault plays a “guess who said it” game, giving a quotation that sounds as if it were written by a Victorian-era European doctor. According to this source, masturbation is a “disease in itself,” and is “dangerous in that it leads to stagnation; harmful to society in that it goes against the propagation of the species; and because in all respects it is a source of countless ills, it requires prompt treatment” (16). But the author, it turns out, was not a Victorian Christian, but a first-century Greek physician.
We might imagine today that Greeks were sexual hedonists while Christians were obsessed with sin and opposed to pleasure. But such an idea is immediately contradicted by the sources. Almost all of the concerns about sexuality we now associate with Christianity “were already present at the core of Greek and Greco-Roman thought” (15). Foucault identifies four areas of concern—a “thematic complex” or “a quadri-thematics of sexual austerity”—that were continuous across the two:
Fear of masturbation (body): We’ve covered that one, but basically a concern about masturbation as a threat to both physical and social health.
An ideal of sexual moderation (wife). Foucault mentions a parable about elephant sex that Saint Francis de Sales (16th century) used to model proper sexual behavior to Christians. Elephants mate in secret, only mate with one partner, then hide out for six days and wash themselves before returning to the herd. But this was not just a Christian thing. (Animal sex turns out to be a surprisingly big part of ancient moral philosophy!4) The elephant story was actually handed down nearly word for word from the Roman philosopher Pliny (1st century). As this and many other examples show, Foucault says, some classical schools of thought extolled sexual moderation and marital fidelity as “a manifestation of inner strength, virtue, and self-mastery” (17).5
Disapproval of male effeminacy (boys). Nineteenth-century European literature was full of mocking depictions of “inverts,” or men who who cross-dressed, wore makeup and physically comported themselves like women. But so was classical literature. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates disapproves of loving “soft boys” who are “made up with rouge and decked out in ornaments”; centuries later, the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca inveighed against men who were “competing in bodily softness with women, beautifying themselves with filthy fineries.” (Seneca was, somewhat problematically for his Roman context, attracted to adult male athletes.) None of these derogatory comments meant that Greeks or Romans disapproved of homosexual activity in general, but that they made “strongly negative judgments concerning some possible aspects of relations between men, as well as a definite aversion to anything that might denote a deliberate renunciation of the signs and privileges of the masculine role.” (19)
An ideal of sexual abstinence (truth). Foucault: “The virtuous hero who is able to turn aside from pleasure, as if from a temptation into which he knows not to fall, is a familiar figure in Christianity—as common as the idea that this renunciation can give access to a spiritual experience of truth and love that sexual activity excludes. But equally well known in pagan antiquity was the figure of those athletes of self-restraint who were sufficiently masters of themselves and their cravings to be able to renounce sexual pleasure.” Already in Greek thought, “the thematics of a relationship between sexual abstinence and truth was quite prominent” (20).
Foucault is not saying that Greeks and Christians were the same, but that comparing the “thematics” of their reflections on sexuality will not tell us much about how they were different. We have to look not just at their official beliefs, but at how they were used, at what they understood these moral ideas to be for.
How do you solve a problem like morality?
“Anyone who wishes to study the history of a ‘morality’ has to take into account the different realities that are covered by the term,” Foucault writes in Chapter 3 (29). “Morality” can mean many things, including:
A moral code, or system of rules and regulations codified in moral teaching or law
Behavioral morality, or how individuals personally relate to a moral code, whether they “believe” in it or choose to follow it
The “ethical substance” of morality. I confess I’m not entirely sure what Foucault means by this, but I think he means the practical way you understand acting out your morality—by fighting temptation, by being faithful to another person, etc
The “mode of subjection,” or why you submit to morality—because it expressing belonging to a group, or because you see yourself as part of a tradition, or because you want to be a brilliant example to others
Ethical work on yourself, i.e., or the efforts you undertake to make yourself “moral” in your own eyes and “live your best life.” There is a connotation of self-discipline or taking responsibility for yourself, as when people talk about “working on themselves.” (A lot of modern people see going to therapy as a form of ethical work on themselves, “dealing with their shit.”) But there is also the grander connotation of aesthetics here: of transforming your life into a “work,” something fully realized and beautiful. (A lot of people on Substack see reading and writing this way, as a kind of discipline in the service of a higher vision of life they set for themselves.)
The details of these are not all super important; what Foucault is getting at is that there are different types or “styles” of morality, and that if a historian wants to follow how “morality” changes over time, they need to be aware of which one they’re talking about. A history of moral codes would be quite different than a history of how everyday people think about morality and “work on” their behavior. And, he suggests, different cultures have different styles of morality, or emphasize them differently in different periods: sometimes moral codes and their prohibitions are super important and have real force, and other times they are quite minimal and take a backseat to other modes of thinking about morality.
Now for the payoff. Foucault says that, as he traces ideas about sexuality, within the “package” of broader conceptions of morality, he is going to examine both moral codes and ethical ideals—that is, moral ideas that are encoded in systems and enforced with prohibitions as well as moral ideas that are more like models for living a good life or self-help advice. The latter type he associates with askesis (the Greek root of ascetic, which we associate with the extreme self-denial of monks, mystics, or religious cults, but here means discipline in the sense of exercise, training, or practice).
And, finally, at the end of Chapter 3, he offers an introductory hypothesis:
Now, it seems clear, from a first approach at least, that moral conceptions in Greek and Greco-Roman antiquity were much more oriented toward practices of the self and the question of askesis than toward codifications of conducts and the strict definition of what is permitted and what is forbidden. … The accent was placed on the relationship with the self that enabled a person to keep from being carried away by the appetites and pleasures, to maintain a mastery and superiority over them, to keep his senses in a state of tranquility, to remain free from interior bondage to the passions, and to achieve a mode of being that could be defined by the full enjoyment of oneself, the perfect supremacy of oneself over oneself. (30-31)
If it is not clear by now, Foucault is proposing to study the experience of sexuality through the study of styles of morality. That makes The History of Sexuality not just a work about sex, but about the fundamental questions of how to live well and the different ways people approach rules for living well. But I promise there’s plenty of sex to come.
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“Hermeneutics” means the interpretation of texts, but is basically synonymous with “interpretation” here. A hermeneutics of sexual desire means something like a self-interpretation, a self-decoding.
This is sometimes called Foucault’s “ethical turn” or even a shift from a Nietzschean outlook to a more liberal one. (Nietzsche’s view that truth is the product of power and domination, to put it crudely, was one of Foucault’s greatest influences.) In any event, it was immediately and widely perceived at the time to be a major shift and perhaps even contradictory to Foucault’s previous method.
French for “work,” as in a work of art (oeuvre d’art) or the life work of an author. A single contemporary book is usually a livre or an ouvrage; oeuvre has the grander connotation of a writer or artist’s work as a whole. Apologies for the pedantry, but I love rambling about French.
Which Jacques Derrida frequently pointed out and I never paid much attention. For example: “Aristotle, let us note in passing, has ushered in a long tradition of frivolous remarks on the philosophical topos of bees…”
Foucault notes how peculiar it is that classical moral thought was not addressed to the people who lived under the heaviest social and moral constraints in classical society: women. One might imagine women would receive elaborate moral instruction in which their roles and rules were spelled out. But, on the contrary, classical moral reflection “was an ethics for men: an ethics thought, written, and taught by men, and addressed to men. … A male ethics, consequently, in which women figured only as objects or, at most, as partners that one had best train, educate, and watch over when one had them under one’s power, but stay away from when they were under the power of someone else” (22). As we’ll see later, Christianity brings women into the picture in a much different way.
Unsurprisingly, Foucault’s use of “high literary” Greek sources produced by free male citizens has been criticized by feminist scholars. There is surely more to be said, but one such critique I consulted seemed to consider it a blindness or “mistake” in Foucault’s analysis, when in fact, as the quote above shows, he is quite explicit about what the sources he is using are unable to tell us.