BOOKS
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such as "adult entertainment"; he turned instead to the remote past
where, presumably, modern attitudes toward that human condition
had been formed. Volume Two of the
History,
"The Exploitation of
Pleasure," published in 1984, describes what Foucault believed to
have been the ancient Greeks' view of sexuality; a companion
volume, "Looking After Oneself' discusses the (in his view) more
consciously moral attitude of Greeks and Romans in the first cen–
turies of our era, before Christianity began to impose its restrictions
on the enjoyment of one of the few enduring human pleasures. The
austere and influential attitudes of the Fathers of the Church form
the subject of a fourth volume, that he had not yet completed at his
death. However, "Confessions of the Flesh"
(Les Aveux de la Chair)
will
be published in the form that he left it.
The two volumes about the ancient world, like the introductory
volume, are more declamatory than analytic. Foucault makes a
statement, summarizes the content of some book or treatise in sup–
port or amplification, and then begins again with a new assertion
related to the first. Subsections are numbered, so that the reader has
at least the impression that he is making logical progress through the
vast moral and social issues sexuality seems always to have raised.
But although Foucault is prepared to tell us what Plato or Xenophon
said about love or the sexual act, he offers no explanation of why
they said it, or of the relation of philosophical theory to actual prac–
tice. In fact, Foucault offers us not so much a survey of ancient
thought as a discursive commentary on the
values
inherent in ancient
notions about sex. In Volume Two, which covers sexuality in the
Greek world until the Hellenistic period, Foucault claims that while
the Greeks attached moral weight to sexual questions, unlike
ourselves, they had little interest in actual practice.
For the Greeks, says Foucault, sexuality raised larger issues of
power and self-control, assertion and passivity, reciprocity and in–
dividuality, heterosexuality and homosexuality. Plato, in the
Sym–
posium,
saw
eros
and
ta aphrodisia
merely as means of becoming able to
recognize goodness in the abstract. Aristotle advised controlling
one's emotions in order to make the best use of one's reasoning
powers, and compared the relation of men and women to that of
masters and slaves. Xenophon, in his treatise
On the Household,
showed
how marriage can serve as an illustration for the examined life,
where the husband instructs his wife about what she is to say and do
and how she should arrange each storage room. In medical treatises,
also, sexual feelings are described only in general terms, and only so
