Affections of the Greeks

November 10, 1985
Affections of the Greeks
By MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM

THE USE OF PLEASURE
The History of Sexuality, Volume Two.
By Michel Foucault. Translated by Robert Hurley.

hen a serious and courageous thinker has died an untimely death, it is difficult to report that his last work is not only disappointing, but also a retreat from the principles that defined his career. It is more difficult still when, as in the present case, the work deals with the thinker's deepest personal and political concerns, and when the reviewer shares his belief in the importance of those concerns. With sadness, then, it must be said that ''The Use of Pleasure,'' the second of four volumes in Michel Foucault's ''History of Sexuality,'' is both mediocre and a departure from views about the inseparability of ideas from social institutions that have been his most valuable legacy to modern philosophy.
Volume One of ''The History of Sexuality,'' which appeared in 1976 in France, dealt with early modern (17th- and 18th-century) thought about sexuality. Foucault, who held the chair in History of Thought at the College de France from 1970 until his death in 1984, then came to believe that his genealogical inquiry into the origins of the modern idea that each human being has a ''sexuality,'' in terms of which his or her identity is in some sense defined, had to begin earlier, with the ancient Greeks. He interrupted writing for several years, during which time he read Greek texts and conversed with historians of antiquity. The result was three further volumes, covering the period between the fifth century B.C. and the development of early Christian thought. Although Volumes Two and Three were in some sense completed for publication by Foucault, he wrote them while already dying. It is widely agreed that they do not fully represent his original intentions.
What moved Foucault to take this long detour away from periods in which he was more comfortable as a scholar? In his moving preface he tells us he believes a work of historical-philosophical scholarship can liberate us by showing the possibility of other ways of life. ''The object was to learn to what extent the effort to think one's own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently.'' What thought silently thinks, in this post-Christian era, is that homosexuality is perverse and against nature, a deformation of the structure of desire itself. Homosexuals are subjects of a different ''sexuality.''
By thinking with pertinacity and imagination about the Greeks we can, Foucault argues, discover for ourselves a society that treats erotic desire as a single undifferentiated longing for the beautiful in all of its forms, that sees the central ethical problem is not the separation of the normal from the perverse, but rather the elaboration of techniques - both mental and physical - by which all human beings can and should master their bodily desires. Foucault develops this picture in Volume Two by investigating arguments about appetite and its control in writings of philosophers and medical thinkers of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.; he focuses above all on Plato and Xenophon.
Writing the history of ancient Greek thought about sexuality is a delicate task, one that requires exacting scholarship. The surviving evidence takes many forms: texts from philosophy, history, medicine, poetry, oratory; erotic vase painting; inscriptions and papyruses that provide essential information about historical events and daily ways of life. This evidence is presented in Sir Kenneth Dover's masterly ''Greek Homosexuality,'' to which Foucault acknowledges a great debt. But Sir Kenneth is not a philosopher; his study, focusing on popular thought, could certainly have been supplemented by one that presses the philosophical texts and issues harder and then asks Foucault's tough comparative questions. Can such a study be written, however, by someone who lacks all the usual scholarly tools, including knowledge of Greek and Latin? Foucault hopes that, with due ''care, patience, modesty, and attention,'' it can. The result makes us doubt this.
To begin with, Foucault is automatically cut off from any evidence that is not translated (this includes some crucial evidence on women, to whom the book's attention is in any case uneven), and he is doomed to rely on the vagaries of translators for the rest. Pretty well ignorant of Greek political and social history and of the problems of scholarship surrounding the texts he uses, he cannot securely place what he does read. Thus, he seems to have no clear idea when the various medical treatises of the Hippocratic corpus might have been written; he uses the name ''Hippocrates'' at times as if he thought it referred to a single author - though it is well known that the works span several centuries and represent different social and intellectual backgrounds. The philosophers themselves are never placed concretely as to their social class, political orientation or relation to thinkers of other classes. Writings that would have supplied a contrasting political perspective on sexual matters - above all the comedies of Aristophanes -are inexplicably ignored. Even when he engages in textual interpretation, he makes little attempt to puzzle out in detail the argument of a single work or passage. Foucault plunders his sources for bits of evidence that will help him make a striking collage; the result is that he makes far too few distinctions, and no single piece is seen as a part of the historical whole from which it originally came. F OUCAULT excuses this procedure by pleading that his is ''not the work of a 'historian.' . . . It [is] a philosophical exercise.'' This is not a legitimate distinction, as he should have been the first to know. The philosophical writing of an era cannot be fruitfully recovered or assessed without understanding it as part of a culture, in its complex relations with the institutions - social, literary, political, religious -of that culture. For years, Foucault had emphasized this point. It is sad to see him lose hold of it here.
His own methods constrain his treatment of philosophical issues in many ways. This is a book about Greek ideas concerning pleasure. But Greek thinkers who discussed pleasure did not assume, as Foucault (heir in this respect to empiricist-utilitarian assumptions) seems to, that pleasure is a feeling or sensation, having its source in activities but distinct from them. Helped to see different possibilities by a language that uses verbal locutions (''enjoy,'' ''take pleasure in'') more often than the noun, the Greeks passionately debated the question, What is pleasure? (For only when it is correctly defined, they believed, can we go on to ask what part it plays in the good life.) Is it, indeed, a feeling? Is it a kind of activity of the organism? Is it neither of these, but instead something that supervenes on activity? Here is an area where Greek arguments do help us to challenge our modern assumptions about pleasure and well-being. Foucault is not enough of a classical scholar even to perceive the issues.
This is part of a larger, enforced neglect in his discussion of the development of the Greek vocabulary of desire. Here, going beyond translations would have revealed a rich and complex debate about whether desire is a brutish push, or rather (as Aristotle argues) an orexis, a selective reaching-forward that actively interprets the world. The picture embodied in the Aristotelian vocabulary does indeed help us to think differently and to distance ourselves from portions of the Christian heritage; yet Foucault again misses the issue. Equally troublesome is his silence concerning the different strains of thought about desire's object - is it the whole person or some attribute of the person (beauty or nobility, for example) he or she might share with others? This too seems to be an urgent ethical issue, with implications for our own thought on such social habits as courtship, love and mourning.
In none of these essential areas can the job Foucault's project requires be done without real scholarship and careful analytical thought. Thus, his true and exciting claims regarding certain Greek thinkers' attention to questions of self-mastery get dragged down by the vagueness and incompleteness of the account as a whole. Books in philosophical history can liberate -this one remains a prisoner of its own haste in the face of death.
Martha C. Nussbaum, a professor of philosophy and classics at Brown University, is the author of the forthcoming study ''The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy.''
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