FOUCAULT AND ANCIENT GREEK

SEXUAL MORALITY
ETHICS AS AESTHETICS OF EXISTENCE

Zachary Fouchard

The ‘essay’ – which should be understood as the assay or test

by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and
not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of
communication – is the living substance of philosophy, at least
if we assume that philosophy is still what it was in times past,
i.e., an ‘ascesis’, askēsis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of
thought (Foucault 1985, 9).

The History of Sexuality

Foucault’s History of Sexuality is not a history of sexual behaviours
and practices in the traditional senses, tracing the successive forms,
evolution and dissemination of the notion of “sexuality” through time.
Rather, it traces the persistence of ethical themes, anxieties, and exigencies
related to the notion of “sexuality” as they are historically situated in Ancient
Greek and Greco-Roman thought, on to their early Christian development,
leading up to the Classical and Modern Ages, and taking final form in
contemporary European sexual morality. The reason the notion of sexuality
must be bracketed, however, is that the term itself does not appear in
history until the beginning of the nineteenth century (Foucault 1985, 3).
Nonetheless, Foucault notes that the notion arose in connection to other
phenomena – the development of knowledge, normativity and value
assigned to conduct, pleasures and sensations – whose history can, in fact,
be traced prior to the nineteenth century (1985, 3-4).

Thus, the nineteenth-century notion of “sexuality” represents a

historically contingent understanding of practical ethical problems related to
sexual morality that applies to a different worldview, so to speak, than that

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of, say, the early Greek worldview. The general investigation of Foucault’s
History, then, centers on an attempt to historicize that modern experience
whereby an individual recognizes him or herself as subject to the notion of
“sexuality.” In Foucault’s strict methodological fashion, “historicizing” the
experience of sexuality meant critically studying the notion of desire, or of
the desiring subject, underlying the modes according to which individuals
recognizes themselves as sexual subjects; it meant undertaking a genealogy
of “desiring man” in the analysis of practices whereby individuals are “led to
focus their attention on themselves, to decipher, recognize, and acknowledge
themselves as subjects of desire, bringing into play […] a certain relationship
that allows them to discover, in desire, the truth of their being” (Foucault
1985, 5).

In short, the “history” of “sexuality” envisioned by Foucault proceeded

from the modern era, back through early Christianity to antiquity, wondering
why sexual conduct had developed the form of various moral concerns. Why
had the activities and pleasures of sexual behaviour developed early on in
antiquity as various modes of “problematization”? This interrogative
orientation had begun Foucault’s History of Sexuality, whose proper task was
methodologically outlined as a history of “the conditions in which human
beings ‘problematize’ what they are, what they do, and the world in which
they live” (1985, 10). As such, it raised the general question of Ancient
Greek and Greco-Roman “arts of existence,” those understandings of moral
philosophy as intentional and voluntary subjection of the self to
transformation, making one’s life “an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic
values and meets certain stylistic criteria” (Foucault 1985, 10-11).
Therefore, the History of Sexuality is most specifically the history of concern
for sexual conduct, problematized as practices of the self and bringing into
the play the general criteria of an “aesthetics of existence” (1985, 12).

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The Theme of Austerity
At times, the general inquiry of the History of Sexuality substitutes a
“history of ethical problematizations based on practices of the self” for a
“history of systems of morality based, hypothetically, on interdictions”
(1985, 13). More to the point, Foucault opposes the sexual morality of early
Christianity against that of Greek paganism, in order to outline the
similarities that arise within Ancient Greek and early Christian sexual
morality. The theme of austerity is Foucault’s prime example. The early
Christian ethic is of course easily described as “a morality whose precepts
were compulsory and whose scope was universal” (1985, 21), but it mustn’t
be forgotten, either, that austerity was not altogether absent from classical
Greek thought. This, of course, is not to say that Christian morality was
somehow “pre-formed” within ancient thought in the sense of a historically
continuity which Foucault’s earlier work rejects outright. Rather, the idea is
that it is possible to point out similarities within Ancient Greek and Christian
ethics – the theme of austerity, for example – as they cross through
institutions, through sets of precepts, through extremely diverse theoretical
references, and in spite of many alterations, maintain a certain constancy in
time (Foucault 1985, 21-22).

And though the theme of austerity, as outlined by Foucault in its

coercive dimension of sexual obligation and interdiction, developed both in
Greek and Christian thought as unique, yet co-extensive moral systems, the
dissymmetry between both is the point at hand: it represents “a peculiar
feature of all the moral reflection on sexual behaviour” belonging to Ancient
times (1985, 22). For while prohibitions and coercive obligations were
fundamental to the early Christian ethic in its concern for sexual austerity,
moral reflection upon the same theme within the Ancient Greek ethic did not
try to define a field of conduct concerning behaviour owing to universally
recognized interdictions, “solemnly recalled in codes, customs and religious

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prescriptions” (Foucault 1985, 23). In fact, moral reflection upon the theme
of sexual austerity at this time concerned the manner within which moral
conduct called upon the individual to exercise the free man’s rights, his
power, his authority, and finally, his liberty. Therefore, while the particular
content of ethical concern differed from one philosophy to the next, the very
fact of moral concern remained.

The practice of pleasure was not frowned upon in ancient Greece in the
manner it was later on within the early Christian era, but was nonetheless
expressed as a problem of stylization requiring the elaboration of a certain
moral activity or choice in the exercise of one’s power and the practice of his
liberty (Foucault 1985, 23). What remains, then, from this Christian-Greek
dichotomy is the “axis of experience” tied to sexual morality as a
problematization of sexual behaviour: where “sexuality” is understood as an
object of concern, it develops at the same time as a material for aesthetic
stylization, albeit in different historical forms (Foucault 1985, 23-24).

Morality and Practice of the Self: Notes on Methodology

Before setting out on the investigation of why the sexual axes of
human experience came to be conceived as a particular domain of moral
experience, Foucault outlines four methodological notes that allow for a
clearer understanding of “morality” in connection with “practices of the self.”
His basic philosophical understanding of morality is one of “a set of values
and rules of action that are recommended to individuals through the
intermediary of various prescriptive agencies.” But at the same time,
Foucault notes that morality “also refers to the real behaviour of individuals
in relation to the rules and values that are recommended to them” (1985,
25). Therefore, inclined more towards a “morality of behaviours,” Foucault
seeks to describe various “practices of the self” in relation to the manners in
which an individual more or less submits his actions and general behaviour

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to various standards of conduct (1985, 25-26).

This manner in which one conducts one’s self – the way in which one
stylizes the self into an ethical subject –, Foucault outlines as four
methodological dimensions of “morality.” In a first instance, there is the
“determination of ethical substance,” the very constitution of the self as a
“prime material” of one’s moral conducts (Foucault 1985, 26). Sexual
austerity, for example, determines the self as an ethical substance in
concrete practices of interdiction and obligation, observed by an individual’s
mastery over his desires. The “substance” in this context could, for instance,
be characterized by the individual strength required to resist temptation.

Second, there is the dimension morality which Foucault terms its

“mode of subjection”; that is, the establishment of a relation shared between
individual and rule of conduct, which allows the individual to recognize him
or herself as obliged to put that relation into practice (Foucault 1985, 27).
Sexual austerity, once again, determines the self in its mode of subjection as
recognition and compliance to the various social codes determining austerity,
in terms of the “mode” or reason for adherence to the rule.

There is also that dimension of morality termed “elaboration,” where

the “ethical work” performed on one’s self is understood, not as simple
compliance to rules of conduct, but the particular transformation of the self
into the ethical subject of one’s behaviour (Foucault 1985, 27). The methods
practiced by an individual in the effort to mould one’s self constitute, here,
the elaborative dimension of morality.

Finally, moral conduct exhibits a dimension that Foucault terms the

“telos of the ethical subject,” where an action is seen as not simply moral in
its singularity, but also “by virtue of the place it occupies in a pattern of
conduct” (1985, 27-28). Thus, as moral actions tend towards their
accomplishment, so too do they push beyond themselves towards the

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establishment and commitment of the individual to a certain “mode of being”
Foucault characterizes as the ethical subject.

In short, then, morality is understood by Foucault, in connection with

the reality which encompasses it and the relation to the individual self that
grounds it, as a process in which the individual creates within him or herself
a certain mode of being that forms the object of his or her moral practice.

Freedom and the Aesthetic of Existence

In light of the ways in which classical Greek thought problematized
sexual behaviour as a domain of moral valuation and choice, a particular
stylization of sexual morality stands out as a moral philosophy leading to an
aesthetics of existence. According to Foucault, the ancient Greeks
understood the government of desires and pleasures and the exercise of
self-mastery as an ethical problem fundamental to the notion of freedom
(1985, 78). Freedom in classical Greek thought was much less a matter of
independence from external constraints as it was an ideal characterization of
the relationship an individual conceptualizes with himself. To be free was to
be free of “the enslavement of the self by oneself,” and to be free in relation
to pleasure was to be free of their authority; it was to not be their slave
(Foucault 1985, 79).

This freedom – derived from the experience of pleasure and desire,

problematized as a domain of moral valuation – was understood as the
“power” one brought to bear on and govern one’s self (Foucault 1985, 80). It
was the telos of moral action, understood not as conformity to a code of
behaviour but as the motivating factor behind a particular stylization of the
self; a “savoir-faire” and an “art de vivre” that depended on the effort of the
individual in order to establish a certain degree of mastery over the self
(Foucault 1985, 91). This “ascesis,” characterized as an active freedom,
represented the ancient Greek problematization of pleasure and sexual

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behaviour as a domain of ethics. Morality took on the form of a philosophical
strategy aimed at self-mastery and transformation.

“Sexuality” was problematized as a domain pertaining to moral

behaviour, and represented at the same time an opportunity for increased
individual freedom through the constitution of one’s self as an ethical
subject. Therefore, freedom is outlined by Foucault’s study of sexual
pleasure in classical Greece as the culminating product of the Greek
individual’s experience of “sexuality” and its problematization as an object of
“practices of the self.” The aesthetic stylization of the self grounds moral
inquiry in terms of “the living substance of philosophy” itself – an ‘ascesis’,
askēsis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought (Foucault 1985, 9).