THE DEBATE IN ANTIQUITY ON THE LOCATION OF THE MIND: ORIGIN, DEVELOPMENT AND MISREPRESENTATION

In one of the first chapters of his systematic account of the treatment of acute and chronic diseases, the Latin medical author Caelius Aurelianus (fifth century ce) discusses phrenitis, a psychosomatic disorder with symptoms including acute fever, mental confusion, a weak and fast pulse and various forms of abnormal behaviour such as the picking of threads out of clothing. Caelius Aurelianus, himself belonging to the medical school called the Methodists, begins his argument, as usual, with a survey of the views on the nature and origin of this disease held by doctors belonging to other schools of thought, in particular their views on the question of which part of the body is affected by the disease. His main reason for doing so is to show the contrast between his own and only correct treatment of the disease and the general confusion among other doctors:

INTRODUCTION

In a number of his writings Aristotle discusses a type of people he calls ‘the melancholics’ (hoi melancholikoi), without ever giving a definition of melancholy; indeed he does not even mention the term melancholia. He only mentions, in passing, some typical features of a melancholic, sometimes adding a short psychological or physiological explanation, yet without relating these features to each other or to an underlying physiological theory. There is just one chapter (30.1) of the Problemata physica (Pr.), a collection of knowledge attributed to Aristotle, that contains a rather extensive discussion of melancholy. However, it is unlikely that the form in which this collection has come down to us dates back to Aristotle. Recent scholarship has attributed the theory in this chapter to Theophrastus rather than Aristotle; according to Diogenes Laertius (5.44), Theophrastus wrote a treatise ‘On Melancholy’ (Peri melancholias) and the chapter in the Problemata is thought to be a summary or a revised version of this (lost) text.

So far no attempt has been made to describe Aristotle's concept of melancholy as based on his undisputed works, and to compare it to the theory presented in Pr. 30.1. Yet such an attempt could be useful, both because it would be the only way to provide a solid basis for assessing the theory presented in the Problemata, and because attempts to relate this theory to pre-Aristotelian, especially medical views have proved unsuccessful. Despite extensive research, the concept of melancholy in the Hippocratic Corpus remains a complicated issue.

INTRODUCTION

In antiquity Diocles of Carystus enjoyed the reputation of being a ‘younger Hippocrates’, or ‘second in fame and venerability to Hippocrates’. Yet this did not prevent him from developing his own ideas and from writing medical treatises in his own style in the Attic dialect. To be sure, later reports on his doctrines often represent him as being in perfect agreement with ‘Hippocrates’ on various subjects; but the fragments of his works that have been preserved, show that the authority of ‘the great Coan’ did not prevent him from taking issue with some ideas and practices that are similar to what is to be found in texts which we call Hippocratic. Of course we do not know whether Diocles, if he had actually read these works, took them to be by Hippocrates – in fact, if we accept Wesley Smith's suggestion that the Hippocratic Corpus was created by third-century Alexandrian philologists who brought together a number of anonymous medical works into one collection under the name of Hippocrates, we may wonder whether anything like Hippocratic authority already existed in Diocles' time (not to mention the fact that Diocles' date itself is the subject of another controversy). It is not even certain that Diocles had ever heard of Hippocrates or was familiar with any of his genuine works.

This heaping up of uncertainties at the beginning of this chapter may appear a rather weak rhetorical strategy.

Introduction

The author of the Hippocratic treatise On the Sacred Disease is renowned for his criticism of magical and superstitious conceptions and modes of treatment of epilepsy. He has been credited with attempting a ‘natural’ or ‘rational’ explanation of a disease which was generally believed to be of divine origin and to be curable only by means of apotropaeic ritual and other magical instruments. One interesting point is that he does not reject the divine character of the disease, but modifies the sense in which this disease (and, as a consequence of this conception, all diseases) may be regarded as divine: not in the sense that it is sent by a god, for example as a punishment, and is to be cured by this same god, but that it shares in the divine character of nature in showing a fixed pattern of cause and effect and in being subordinated to what may perhaps be called, somewhat anachronistically, a natural ‘law’ or regularity.

On the basis of these positive statements on the divine character of the disease various interpreters have tried to deduce the writer's ‘theology’ or religious beliefs, and to relate this to the development of Greek religious thought in the fifth century.

Whether its title, ὐπ⋯ρ τοũ μ⋯ γενν⋯ν (‘On Sterility’, ‘On Failure to Produce Offspring’), is authentic or not, the work transmitted as ‘Book 10’ of Aristotle's History of Animals (Hist. an.) deals with a wide range of possible causes for failure to conceive and generate offspring. It sets out by saying that these causes may lie in both partners or in either of them, but in the sequel the author devotes most of his attention to problems of the female body. Thus he discusses the state of the uterus, the occurrence and modalities of menstruation, the condition and position of the mouth of the uterus, the emission of fluid during sleep (when the woman dreams that she is having intercourse with a man), physical weakness or vigour on awakening after this nocturnal emission, the occurrence of flatulence in the uterus and the ability to discharge this, moistness or dryness of the uterus, wind-pregnancy, and spasms in the uterus. Then he briefly considers the possibility that the cause of infertility lies with the male, but this is disposed of in one sentence: if you want to find out whether the man is to blame, the author says, just let him have intercourse with another woman and see whether that produces a satisfactory result.

The main aim of this book is to clarify the moral concern about sexuality and sexual activities expressed by leading authors in classical antiquity. Michel Foucault was, of course, the first thinker to undertake this clarification, and one aim of his stimulating study was to demonstrate the way in which his new ethics programme worked. Therefore my starting point is the reconstruction of claims about the control of the desires and the creation of the moral subject in classical philosophical, medical, economic and rhetorical texts which Michel Foucault presents in the second volume of The History of Sexuality (The Use of Pleasure (UP)). There is now a mass of literature on Foucault's programme of ethics, some of which also deals with his interpretation of ancient sources. But most authors treat his analyses of these texts as documents illustrating his intellectual development, which is their primary interest. None of them subjects his thoughts on ancient sources to a detailed critical assessment in order to suggest alternative readings that are based not only on the general theoretical premises of Foucault's project, but also on modern standards of textual interpretation and the present state of philosophical and historical knowledge of the ancient world. What follows is intended to reduce this deficit.

Much of what I have to say is a critical reconstruction of Foucault's own reconstruction – while at the same time I try to maintain the systematic aspects of his perspective.

Foucault's analysis of ancient philosophical texts as well as the divergent interpretations that I have proposed in earlier chapters both make use of the distinction between the male and the female. But this distinction could refer to either biological sex or social gender. The relationship between the two, and a reference to biological sex differences, has long been the subject of heated controversy in feminist theory. This debate is not only of systematic interest, it also compels scholars who interpret ancient texts dealing with moral attitudes towards sexuality to reflect explicitly on the form of their historical reference to the male and the female.

The notion of gender would appear to be dependent on and relative to historical and cultural contexts and is therefore often assumed to be socially constructed. This means, however, that in historical studies, for instance on ancient culture, this notion cannot be applied without further qualification, in particular where such studies are intended to contribute to an understanding of historical attitudes towards sexuality, and thus more generally towards gender. Post-modern thought as influenced by Foucault has seen an increasing tendency to refer solely to the concept of social gender, and to brand any reference to biological sex as naive and patriarchal. Influential feminist approaches have interpreted Foucault in a manner that threatens to deprive his historical studies on sexuality of an important, if trivial, foundation – the reference to the sexes beyond cultural boundaries and specifications.

A crucial part of Foucault's ethics programme consists in looking at the forms of moral regulation which were involved in the behaviour of the husband towards his wife, and of the pederast towards his young beloved, in classical antiquity. Foucault has good reasons for thinking that the way in which the role of dominant partners in asymmetrical relationships is problematised should provide particularly revealing insights into moral attitudes to sexuality. According to Foucault, when moralists of the classical period prescribe sexual moderation for the husband or the pederast in spite of his dominant social position, then this is an act of disciplining which has little to do with respect for the interests of an equal partner in a relationship, i.e. with the adoption of a ‘moral position’ in the Kantian sense. Rather it is a question of demonstrating a self-control that gives one's life an aesthetic splendour and recommends one for a political career. ‘Govern yourself no less than your subjects and consider that you are in the highest sense a king when you are a slave to no pleasure, but rule over your desires more firmly than over your people’ is Isocrates' advice in a speech delivered to the young monarch Nicocles. Nicocles' own speech to his people (which Isocrates also wrote) is a detailed proof of his ‘self-mastery as a moral precondition for leading others’, as Foucault puts it: political leadership can and should be unhesitatingly entrusted to a monarch who can demonstrate that he is master of himself.

Foucault's analysis of Platonic erotics brings him to an extremely complicated domain of classical ancient philosophy, and one that can be discussed from a number of angles. In the ‘relation to truth’ he sees the decisive new perspective Plato introduces into the classical Greek theory on love.

Within this new framework of erotics Foucault correctly diagnoses a series of fundamental shifts in the problematisation of love in the relevant Platonic dialogues, in particular the transition

• from the question of behaviour in love, to the question of the nature of love;

• from the question of the honour of the boy, to the question of the love of truth;

• from the question of the asymmetry of erotic relationships, to the question of the convergence of mutual love;

• from the question of the virtue of the beloved, to the question of love for the master and his virtue.

Foucault begins his analysis of classical ancient philosophy by looking at the ethical discourses that deal with sexual pleasure and its problematisation. This he does on the same four levels that he had previously identified as the central aspects of every ethical investigation – ethical substance, the mode of subjugation, the teleology and ethical work (i.e. the practice of the self that the subjects must be engaged in to transform themselves into moral persons). The textual basis he employs consists almost exclusively of passages from the works of Plato, Aristotle and Xenophon. The main results of his analyses of these texts can be summarised as follows.

The crucial passages studied by Foucault identify the aphrodosia – the dynamic of the interconnection of desires, sexual activity and pleasure which threatens to exceed all confines and destroy all order and reason – as the central subject of moral concern, that is as the ethical substance. Two main parameters are at the heart of the analysis of this dynamic: the quantitative degree of activity and the sexual polarity. It is not the forms of love and its practices that are important for the moral problematisation of pleasure, but the number and frequency of sexual acts, as well as the differentiation between the subject and the object of appetite – that is matters of moderation and greed, and of activity and passivity, in both heterosexual and homoerotic relationships. Appetite and pleasure are considered to be natural and necessary, and so are not intrinsically bad.

According to Foucault, classical medical texts on the guidelines for an ideal regimen provide further instructive illustrations of the ways in which sexuality was problematised in the ancient world. One of the most important results of his analysis of these texts is that ancient dietetics develops a comprehensive perspective of bodily activity: it regulates nourishment, physical exercise, sleep, bathing and sometimes sexuality too. Foucault points to a number of important parameters that ancient dietetics relies on – the quantity, the overall state of the body, the length of time, the season, the general climate, general human nature; nor should the relationship of all these aspects to each other be forgotten. As Foucault sees it, ancient dietetics does not just suggest isolated rules for good health, but an overall regulation of life that covers both the mental and the moral aspect. Ancient dietetics pre-supposes not only that the care of the body and of the soul are mutually dependent on each other, it also maintains that mental discipline is a precondition of a successful regimen; above all, the primary aim of dietetics is not the unqualified prolongation of life, but the optimisation of the quality of life, that is the maximisation of pleasurable health within natural bounds. This goal depends on a concept of the good life, for following rational dietetic regulations is an indication of the mental self-control which is an intrinsic part of a good life.

According to one influential interpretation, in his later years Foucault turned his attention to the ‘practice of an intellectual freedom’ which ‘goes beyond the modern relationships between will, power and subjectivity’. This reading claims that Foucault's ethics aims to be – at least partly – free of the process of regulation and discipline which the analysis of power had revealed to be the all-pervasive element of the modern age, and maintains that it is concerned with ‘effective resistance to a wide-spread type of power’ and to modern ‘forms of dominance and exploitation’. It is in precisely this sense that Foucault's ethics is supposed to be political, while at the same time it is the last, perhaps even the most important, step in his attempt to subvert psychoanalytically based interpretations of the self, and to demonstrate that they are a form of coercion and political power to which psychoanalysis subjects our desire and our unconscious. Finally, the ethics as a practice of liberation is intended to provide an aesthetics of existence ‘which resists the science of life’ and ‘frees us from the empire of scientific knowledge’.

The general direction of this interpretation is quite clear. Foucault's opposition to universal anthropological, moral and rationalist categories has reaped criticism from influential authors such as Charles Taylor and Jürgen Habermas, who accuse him of abandoning all critical potential, with the result that he is unable to appreciate his historical analyses as an integral part of an emancipatory movement.

One feature the philosophies we have examined so far have in common is that for them the energeia of God has no specifically religious importance. It is philosophically important, of course, because the existence and character of the world are to be understood in light of it. Yet it plays no role in the religious quest to know God. The nearest to an exception is Aristotle, for whom we must strive to “make ourselves immortal so far as we can” by sharing in the divine activity of contemplation (Nic. Eth.x.7–8). Aristotle does not conceive of this as a way of coming into communion with God, however, but only as a way of achieving well-being by living in accordance with the best element in ourselves. He also does not make much use in this connection of the concept of energeia. Contemplation is also important for the Neoplatonists, but they too do not associate it with the divine energeia, and indeed for them the divine energeia in the highest sense is non-intellective.

We must look elsewhere for the role of energeia in religious thought. When we do, we find that it begins to play a minor but intriguing part in the first century a.d., one that grows as the centuries progress. By about the fourth century both pagans and Christians can be found understanding their religious life as a way of participating in the divine energeia.